Second Strike

by Tim C. Taylor

  I squeaked like a mouse with chronic anxiety issues. My heart pounded so furiously in the resonant chamber of my chest that it was a wonder the ship didn’t roll over.

  I stared at the robot. The robot stared back at me.

  It took several seconds of this tense stand-off before I realized the robot wasn’t actually staring at anything. I didn’t know what had triggered the movement; there was no hum of power, no status lights to register activity. Nothing. The robot was inactive. How could it be otherwise? It was packed for transportation to another continent.

  “Now that,” I told the robot when I was finally satisfied I wasn’t being attacked, “was not very nice.”

  With inhuman speed, the robot’s arm lashed out at my chest, pushing me off the stack of crates. I lunged for the netting with my fingertips and clung on, barely.

  “Here, pal,” the robot said in a voice that was a replica of my own. “Your item is not appropriate in this area. Take it back.” Beams of light shot out from an arc around the top of the robot’s head, piercing the dimness of the hold.

  I looked down and saw, picked out by the intense white light, the grenade the robot had replaced into my webbing.

  I grabbed at the primed fusion bomb, but the robot had been waiting for this and picked that moment to shove me off the tower of crates. This time successfully.

  I was so old, I didn’t actually know my age, but I could still move when I needed to. I pushed off with my feet, back-flipped in midair, and by the time I landed on the deck, I’d flung out the grenade, sending it sailing through the air into the far corner of the compartment.

  Before I could draw my machine pistol, a blast of heat and light threw me across the hold as the grenade exploded prematurely. I thudded into one of the metal baffles that rose a dozen feet from the deck.

  I lay there, straining to wrap my brain around what was going on. It doesn’t sound impressive, I know, but explosions do that to me sometimes.

  To your feet, Marine, said the ghost of long-dead Sergeant Chinole in my head. If the robot could detonate the grenade, maybe it can blow the charges stashed in your hip pouch.

  I watched, entranced, as the robot floated down toward me, its descent slowed by hissing air jets. One by one, a dotted circle of lights lit up on its chest, drawing my attention to the protuberance at its center. My ears were still ringing from the blast, but I heard the whine of a powerful capacitor charging.

  NJ! barked the Sarge. Ndeki!

  “Yes, Sergeant,” I shouted and finally leapt into action. I threw my pouch with the remaining charges across the deck, drew my pistol and fired three short bursts. Sparks flew off the metal body of the robot, sending whining bullets ricocheting dangerously around the compartment.

  The robot kept coming, the red circle of lights nearly complete. The crescendo of pent-up power rose to dominate the ringing in my ears to earsplitting levels. The penultimate light went red.

  I counted to two.

  And then rolled away to one side, a heartbeat before the robot’s chest laser seared the air and burned through the baffle, filling the air with the tang of molten metal.

  The robot lumbered toward me on its tracks, ten feet away now, its laser charging again.

  I had a few seconds. I closed my eyes and withdrew into my mind where my ghosts were waiting for me.

  Advice! I shouted. Give me options.

  Calm down, said my late wife, Sanaa. We’re in our part of your mind now, running at a much faster pace than the world outside. In fact, if you’d acted with a little less haste in the first place, you would have thought to fish out your EMP charge before tossing away your pouch. We need that EMP weapon now. You’re getting excitable, Ndeki. Twitchy. You need to sort that.

  I took the mental equivalent of a few deep breaths and followed her advice. Not the twitchy part — even if there could ever be a right time to take marital advice from a dead spouse, then this was not it — but the part about the EMP charges.

  Check my visual memory buffer, I instructed Bahati, my slightly less late wife. Where did my pouch land?

  It’s no use, Ndeki, she told me. You weren’t looking. I can’t see where it landed, and if you search for it, metal boy will cut you in two and us with you.

  I’ll have to shoot out the laser, I said. The robot’s casing is hardened, but the laser won’t be.

  Too risky, said the Sarge. I know that model from when I was posted to the Akinschet mining colony. The tin thing will have multiple tools inside its chest casing. Even if you do destroy the laser, it will just shift to another lethal alternative.

  You don’t know that, I told him. And I can shoot out the next tool it points at me.

  Negative, the Sarge insisted. Too many variables. Take cover and wait for backup.

  I grimaced inwardly. I’d never disobeyed the Sarge when he was alive, and so far that hadn’t changed after he died. But my former squad leader was now a memory recording fused with his combat AI, and plugged into one of the ports that ran down my spine. At least, he had been when I’d first plugged him in. I wasn’t sure what my ghosts were now.

  Trust your gut, Bahati whispered. It doesn’t let you down. Not often.

  I chose to believe her. I gave Bahati a wink. Sorry, Sarge.

  I pulled myself out of my mind. Getting in is easy, but in the other direction it’s like levering yourself out of a pool of glue. I pulled away and plopped back into the real world.

  The robot had advanced about two feet while I’d been away.

  “Let’s see you dodge this,” I told it, and opened fire at its chest laser.

  Or tried to.

  I got as far as squeezing the trigger, but instead of a burst of bullets, all I got was the empty alert tone sounding from the magazine. Which was a lie. I had plenty of rounds in reserve.

  “Out of luck, human.”

  Damned civilian-grade weapon. Even this maintenance bot could hack it.

  I took one look at the half-circle of lights around its chest and made a mental note to never be so dumb as to ignore the Sarge in the future.

  I ran for cover before it sliced me in two.

  I was caught with my back to a twelve-foot high internal wall that ran nearly halfway across the compartment. I had nowhere else to go, so I went up.

  Twelve feet is a long way up for an Earthborn human, but I was born on the world of Nanatsu-7, and my ancestors had been re-engineered by alien geneticists for a (brief) lifetime of war. Being able to move across obstacles was very definitely a part of that job description.

  I grabbed the top of the baffle with ease and vaulted over. The landing was not so accomplished. Instead of landing on the deck on the far side, I grunted as the breath was knocked out of my lungs when I fell on something hard just over the lip of the baffle. The far side was stacked with filled sacks, nearly up to the top.

  The sacks saved my life because a second after I landed, the robot fired directly beneath me, cutting cleanly through not only the baffle, but carving through the sacks and the netting that secured them.

  I flung my arms out for balance. Without the netting to secure it, the stack of sacks was starting to collapse.

  I reached the controller behind my ear to set my comms to active mode, but stopped halfway there. Instead I went prone and silent. What if the robot thought it had killed me?

  No such luck. “Still alive?” the robot said. “I admire luck in a flesh-sentient.”

  I rolled my eyes. “And I like machines with a sense of character,” I replied, crawling away along the collapsing stack, keeping close to the baffle. “With so much in common, why don’t we stop this fighting and go for a drink instead? Who knows where that might lead?”

  “Crawling away will not aid you,” said the robot. (I carried on anyway.) “I will not miss with my next shot and I have disabled your armament. How does it feel to know you are about to die?”

  “Like it’s just another day in the office.” I set my comms to active mode. Nothing happened.
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br />   “It’s no use trying to call for help,” said the robot. Annoyingly, its impersonation of my voice was getting more accurate every time it spoke. “Your communication device is easily nullified.”

  I wasn’t worried. Help would come. I just had to keep this metal annoyance occupied.

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” I accused.

  “You have no frakking idea how much,” it answered in my voice. “I’ve never killed a human before. It’s always been an ambition of mine.”

  I heard the wheeze of a turbine and my monocle helpfully pointed out the hopelessness of my situation by drawing a blue wire frame representation of the robot levitating on the other side of the baffle.

  I still wasn’t worried, but with my heart pounding and the sweat running down my back, I admit to the onset of mild anxiety. I had to find a weapon and quickly.

  I ripped open a damaged sack and sunk my hand into a sticky white powder. It felt like clay. Would it absorb the energy of the laser?

  A flash of hope raced through my mind.

  And then I remembered the laser had sliced clean through sacks filled with this clay. But it did give me an idea.

  I waited until the crescent of light cresting the robot’s head rose over the top of the barrier between us, the whine of its motor and the charged laser combining to make the metal wall throb with power. I jumped off the collapsing heap of sacks, grabbed the top of the wall, and swung myself up. Gripping the lip of the baffle with my legs, I threw a fistful of clay at the robot’s face.

  “Idiot,” it sneered, which was just as well because its gloating gave me just enough time to bring the real weapon in my other hand to bear.

  Revenge Squad logos bloomed over the robot as I sprayed every shot of acid out of my can of intelligent aerosol. I aimed for any kind of aperture, lens or aerial, and was about to spray the laser when the robot tilted back in midair, aiming the weapon in my face.

  High-energy coherent light seared the air behind me as I jumped up and onto the robot, intending to cling on and rip it apart with my bare hands.

  The prospect of applying violence with hands and feet was so delicious that it was only at the last moment that I noticed it felt as if I were falling into a furnace.

  Over a cup of coffee during one of the occasional intervals between people – and now robots – trying to kill me, I could have told you that directed energy weapons generate so much heat, that the fastest way to blow up your enemy in starship combat is to sabotage its heat sinks. Guess the principle also applied to mining lasers, or whatever this tin thing was using. I twisted in mid-air and kicked at my opponent as I passed, sending it clanging against the baffle. I could feel the heat burning through my boots as I touched it.

  I landed on my feet like a gymnast a fraction of my age, and then sprinted away. On the other side of the compartment was a narrow shelf partially filled with small rectangular crates. I made it to the shelf and leapt over the crates without being killed. Both my ears and my monocle confirmed the robot had descended to the deck and was headed my way.

  “You have blinded me,” the Ndeki Joshua sound-alike told me.

  “Oh, dear,” I said, hugging the deck behind the crates. “That must be dreadfully inconvenient.”

  “Only to a degree.” The robot halted, still some distance away. Good. I hoped it had run out of power. “I can still use my front-mounted echo location,” it told me. “Surrender yourself. Make it easier.”

  “No, you surrender.” We had reached the end game, and I was going to win this. I got to my knees and tested the heft of one of the square boxes. It was empty. Perfect.

  I frowned. Why hadn’t the robot tried to finish me off? Maybe it had only been trying to frighten me all along? “Do you have a prime directive or some such,” I asked it, a wild hope claiming me. “Thou shalt not harm a human, or by your inaction cause a human to be harmed.”

  “Yes.”

  Yes? Was it really going to be this easy?

  “You have the wording almost exactly correct,” the robot explained. “My programming is underpinned by a prime directive. I must not harm the bottom line of Blue Star Logistics, nor by my inaction cause corporate profitability to be harmed. This is why I must kill you. Eventually. It is only a coincidence that hurting sentients is a hobby of mine that I rarely get to indulge.”

  I shrugged. Time to end this. I threw the empty crate into the air, waited for the robot’s laser to shoot it, and when it did I charged the robot.

  It was a simple enough tactic. Now I had drawn the laser’s fire, I would hack its barrel off with my monofilament blade before the robot had time to recharge.

  Behind me, the crate I had thrown landed on the deck with a hollow thud.

  By the time I had drawn my knife, I began to wonder why the crate had sounded intact and why the air didn’t carry the perfume of after-laser ozone. I didn’t spend much time with these concerns because more pressing was the realization that the reason the robot had halted twenty feet away was because it had plugged itself into a power socket.

  “Ship’s main power is rated at 6 GJ,” my voice gloated out of my opponent. “That’s a lot of shots before I have to recharge again. Go on, human. Take your chances and rush me.”

  I backed away toward my shelf. “Shoot me and you’ll damage this extremely valuable cargo I’m standing in front of.”

  “With a low-powered shot, it’s not much of a risk.”

  “But one all the same. I tell you what, robot. I’ll cut you a deal. If it helps, tell yourself this is the pleading of a doomed sentient. You like that, eh, killer?”

  I was standing in front of a homicidal robot aiming a death beam at my chest. If you think that I was acting… well, a little casual about my imminent death by robot, then relax. I wasn’t as mad as I sound. My radio link was useless but there are some forms of communication that can neither be blocked by ceramalloy hatches and bulkheads, nor by psychotic robots. Call them psychic waves. Or psionic meta-pulse beam modulation mommas. Fate hadn’t seen fit to give me the instruction manual, so I didn’t know the proper term, but I did know that if I screamed in my head like a little boy pursued by wasps, then someone would hear me. A very specific someone.

  “Oh, I’m liking this all right,” said the robot. “Guard the assembly site, they tell me. Klin-Tula is a lawless planet, they say. Lawless planet? The only intruder I’ve ever shot was a rat. And it was limping. They even boxed me up for transit. And then you came.”

  A new blob appeared in my monocle’s tactical grid. This one was yellow, which meant it was one of the good guys. See? I told you there was no need to worry.

  “No deal,” the robot said. “Surrender. Hands high and walk away from the cargo. This is your only chance.”

  “No, you surrender. I have a weapon against which you are powerless. Resist and you will be deactivated. Permanently.”

  There was a long pause. Even robots far superior to this one struggle with the unexpected, and it probably detected the truth in my voice. I had meant every word. “I think you are lying,” it nonetheless said. “If you have a secret weapon describe it immediately or I shall shoot.”

  Hedging its bets, eh? I liked this robot.

  “All right,” I said. “You win. My secret weapon is…” I waited until the right moment for maximum dramatic effect. “My secret weapon is right behind you.”

  The robot twisted around but it was too late. An EMP burst blew it away. Fried my comms and turned my monocle black into the bargain.

  “Frakk you, human,” said the origin of the yellow dot in my monocle. “Why tell it to turn around?”

  I walked over to her. “Sorry, boss. Couldn’t help myself.”

  Hands on hips, and brow knitted, you could easily assume Silky was angry. But I knew better.

  The section leader was a Kurlei, an empath species which meant she looked like a pale corpse dredged from the white silt of a dried-up riverbed and cloaked in desiccated fish skins. A nest of stubby appenda
ges swept back from her forehead, resembling a cross between squid tentacles and dreadlocks. Despite the red ribbons tied around the lengths that hung down the back of her long neck, they weren’t just for show. They could both detect and emit emotions.

  Although I personally possessed the empathy of a block of cold granite, I was probably the only person on the planet who was so attuned to her that I could read her feelings. I suspect the fact I’d picked up this talent was linked to us being married. Right now, I could feel Silky’s dominant emotion was a heady sense of relief.

  “Stop fooling around, McCall,” she snapped, unconvincingly. “We’ve work to do and we’re running out of time.”

  “Roger that, boss.” I gave her a hug and she calmed a tad.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and handed me the pouch of charges I’d tossed across the deck. “Just as well you leave your litter all over the place. I was all out of EMP charges because, unlike some useless vecks, I haven’t wasted my time playing silly games with robots. I’ve kept to the schedule.”

  I noticed that we’d somehow transferred the charges without breaking the embrace. If anything, Silky was beginning to melt into my arms. A complex brew of emotions radiated from her tentacles, pulling me down toward them. Her black eyes in their dark orbits looked up at me. I used to think her dark pits looked demonic, but these days they reminded me of the lethal beauty of deep space. Silky released a long breath that half whistled through her pursed lips.

  For the first time, I deliberately breathed in her exhalation, sucking up her scent while remaining locked in her gaze. Her alien breath carried the pleasant freshness of mint and parsley. Now, that was a surprise. I’d been with her for almost two years, but I was only now discovering an urgent curiosity about such details. I decided her scent suited her.

  The curiosity popped. Exotic alien scents, my ass! I recognized that smell all right. She had run out of toothpaste that morning and borrowed mine.

  Breaking away, though, wasn’t as easy as it should have been. My hands had malfunctioned, rebelled. They wouldn’t let go of Silky – not until I admitted to myself that I was holding her not only as if she were a human, but a human with lips like a black hole – an extreme space-time event swallowing all thoughts that didn’t involve my lips brushing against hers.