Major Smythe and I exchanged a look, and I pantomimed wrapping my hands around a beer can and choking it. Smythe reached back over a shoulder and tapped the gear bag he wore. “We can get a line up there, Sir,” he told me confidently.
“You are going to shoot a grappler up that far, like Batman?” That idea did not sound realistic to me. My visor was telling me the bottom of the chandelier was sixty meters from the walkway-bridge thing.
“The Merry Band of Pirates are considerably cooler than Batman,” Smythe replied with a wink. He took out a short tube that had a button on one end. “You’ve used these in training,” he said with a questioning look. He was questioning my memory, my courage, my faith in the fancy Kristang equipment, or all three. “This line can hold a Kristang, it can easily hold a human.”
“Major,” I explained patiently, “my lack of confidence is not in you, your team or our stolen lizard gear. I know those grappler lines work great. My fear is that chandelier, antenna, whatever that thing up there is, looks like it is already falling apart. And this walkway,” I tapped it with the toe of a boot, “is not filling me with confidence either.”
“We can-” Smythe began to say.
“Joe actually has a good point,” Skippy interrupted unhappily. “I have been examining the assembly up there with the limited sensors of your suits, and it appears to be, um, perhaps the best word to describe it is ‘rickety’.”
“Rickety?”
“Yes. I do not mean the assembly suffers from soft bones due to vitamin D deficiency as in the disease called rickets. I mean it appears to be rather weak and flimsy.”
“Flimsy? We should take the risk going up there?”
“Oh, yes,” Skippy assured me, “totally. You should take the risk. I’ll stay here where it’s safe, if you don’t mind.”
“You know, it would be just terrible if I held you over the edge of this walkway and my hand slipped.”
“Ha ha, very funny, Joe.”
“Seriously, is this walkway even safe?”
“The walkway is the last thing you should be concerned about, Joe. I know to an ignorant monkey, a thin plank extending out that far is scary, but it is quite solid. And since we are being serious for a minute, I suggest whoever climbs up to that assembly should be as light as possible to reduce the strain on the chandelier structure up there.”
“Oh, great. Can we use a drone instead?”
“Because the drones we have with us do not have opposable thumbs, sadly, the answer is no, Joe.”
“But you have no problem with one of us monkeys climbing up there.”
“Once again, your species should be totally regretting that you lost your tails. Stupid monkeys. What the hell were your ancestors thinking?”
Ranger Poole stepped forward and spoke before I could answer Skippy’s idiot comment. She even raised her hand like she was still in elementary school. “Colonel? I’m the lightest on the team, even with my armor.”
I stared at her. She was right. She was the shortest member of the team; two of the Chinese Night Tiger women were only slightly taller, but Poole was the shortest person down in the tunnels with us. Smythe had assigned her, as usual, to be my unofficial bodyguard and babysitter. That annoyed me less than it used to; I had given up on winning that argument with Smythe. In this case, because I was carrying Skippy strapped to my waist, I could delude myself Poole was there to protect our defective beer can and not me.
“Better to ditch the armor,” Skippy suggested cheerfully. I felt like strangling him again. He must have picked up on my body language, or he monitored my spike in blood pressure or the galvanic response of my skin or some other nerdy shit like that he used to read my mind. “Hey, I’m not being an ass, Joe. The weight of armor would pose a significant risk to the assembly, and therefore to Lieutenant Poole. If she falls all the way to the bottom, armor itself would not save her from significant, likely fatal, injury. Before you ask whether armor would allow her to survive a fall to the walkway, the answer is no, because she would almost certainly bounce off and fall all the way to the bottom. Also, the weight of armor would put unacceptable strain on a safety line.”
“I think he’s right, Sir,” Poole nodded with enthusiasm. “If something breaks loose up there, I’d rather not worry about armor snapping the safety line.”
“If something breaks up there,” I up glanced up at the chandelier, “I hope it’s not you, Poole. Ok,” I turned to Smythe. “We rig up three cables, attach them to three brackets, whatever up there. If one breaks loose, Poole can use the other two to prevent a fall.” In theory, I told myself. And I wouldn’t be the one risking my neck up there.
First, we sent a hummingbird-sized drone up to recon the assembly, which looked even more flimsy in a close-up view. Skippy was dismayed at the condition of the gear looming above our heads; he concluded someone or something had removed major components of whatever the thing was originally intended to be. “Joe, I think that when this device completed its purpose, whatever that was, it was partly disassembled; maybe the removed components were later used elsewhere. That really doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter, if one of the things they removed is this conduit thingy you need,” I retorted. “Can you confirm it is up there?” We were all watching video from the drone, and I hadn’t seen anything resembling the conduit Smythe’s team had stolen from Barsoom.
“Confirmed. It is this,” he zoomed in the image on a trio of spheres with spiky-looking antennas attached to them. “This thing is a different type of conduit, but it will do. Joe, honestly, from here I can’t tell whether this one is functional. Part of the conduit is inside the assembly, it will need to be removed for inspection.”
“Removed?” That idea did not appeal to me. The back end of the conduit was buried in a large housing, I did not see how Poole could take the housing apart while swinging on a cable. “Would it be better for Poole to carry you up there, so you can get close enough to-”
“No. I know what you’re thinking, Joe, but we need to get the conduit down here and hooked up to a powerpack before I can be sure it is functional. The bad news is, I only see one conduit up there, but I see seven other housings that used to contain similar conduits. For some reason, that conduit was left up there, and that does not make me confident in its condition. I don’t think the Elders would have left one behind, unless it was no longer useful.”
“Great.” I threw up my hands in frustration. “Just freakin’ great.”
“Sir?” Poole short-circuited the diatribe I was about to launch into. “We came all the way down here,” I knew she meant not only all the way down into the tunnels, but also all the way down to Gingerbread, and all the way into the Roach Motel. “I’d like to give it a shot. The safety lines will protect me.”
Smythe nodded, and I knew he was right. “You be careful up there, Poole,” I warned. “There is no rush to do this right now.”
Smythe’s team used three grapples to attach lines to parts of the assembly above the conduit; parts Skippy judged were still structurally sound enough to hold Poole’s weight. Despite my somewhat mocking comparison, the Kristang grapples were not like the crude devices Batman uses. The business end of our grapples was a drone the size of a sparrow, which carried the line up behind it. Using a combination of zPhones and eye-movement tracking in their visors, Smythe’s team guided the drones up to wrap lines around several points, then each drone clamped securely onto its line to hold it in place. Major Smythe was right; the Merry Band of Pirates was way cooler than Batman.
Poole hooked onto the three lines, using one of them and a winch attached to her belt to pull her upward. She ascended slowly, as Skippy anxiously monitored the gently swaying assembly. As Poole got within a couple meters of the lowest point of the assembly, it swayed alarmingly, and a bracket broke off to fall, bounce off the walkway right in front of me, and tumble to the bottom of the chamber with a cringe-inducing clatter. “I’m Ok,” Poole announced in a calm voice. “The lines ar
e solid.” Then she added “Uh-” as one of the brackets a safety line was attached to sagged. That line didn’t have any of her weight on it at the time; the bracket had sagged on its own. “That safety line isn’t, um, safe anymore,” she stated the obvious.
“Hold right there!” I shouted because my helmet faceplate was open and because I am an idiot; she could hear me perfectly well through her zPhone earpiece if I had whispered. “Major Smythe, can you detach that line, and move it somewhere more secure?”
“Yes, Sir,” Smythe replied confidently, because his team was already on it before I spoke. The sparrow-size grapple drone detached from its clamp in the line, flew around to release the line from the bracket, and within less than a minute, the line had an iron grip around the very top of the assembly, where it attached to the ceiling. Maybe that is where we should have tied all the lines in the first place.
Poole tested the two safety lines by tugging on them, then letting her full weight rest on one line, then the other. When she declared herself satisfied, I let her resume the climb, using the winch on her belt. I hated standing uselessly below her, but I needed to trust my people.
“This could be a problem,” Poole announced. “It looks like part of this housing needs to be cut away. I can’t see any seams or gaps.”
“I agree,” Skippy said before I could respond. “Where the other seven conduits used to be, the forward two-thirds of the housings are also missing; they appear to be integral with the conduit. Joe, I recommend Lt. Poole cut around the housing here,” he illustrated the desired cut in the image on my zPhone.
Squashing my internal anxiety, I approved sending a plasma cutter torch up to Poole, and she sliced into the tough material of the housing, taking great care not to damage the conduit within. As she operated the cutter, we all stood with eyes glued to the images in our visors or zPhones, watching every flare of the plasma torch. Every one of us knew, this was our last, best hope to restore Skippy to full awesomeness. To rebuild the Dutchman. To escape from the Roach Motel. To verify Earth was safe.
Our last, best chance to go home.
“Stand back, this thing is about to cut loose,” Poole warned as the cutter neared the last few degrees of a complete circle around the housing. She had attached a line to the conduit so it wouldn’t fall when the housing was sliced away. “There it goes!” The housing fell, bouncing off a bracket which broke and went spinning away to hit the side of the chamber. The housing itself clipped the walkway on its way down, from the way it bounced, the housing must be surprisingly light. My spirits soared that we now had access to the conduit, and no one had been injured.
“Uh oh,” Poole’s tone was more alarming than her words, dashing my momentary good mood. “Shit. Sorry. Skippy, are you seeing this?”
We were all seeing it. The part of the conduit that had been encased in the housing was blackened. “Oh,” Poole groaned. “Did I cook it with the torch?”
“No,” Skippy assured her in an unsteady voice. He had his own fears. “If the plasma had damaged the conduit, it would be more toward the middle. Oh, crap. This is not good. We-”
“Hey,” I cut him off before his negativity could infect us all. “This is Elder tech, they build strong stuff.”
“Ah, but these conduits are delicate, Joe,” the beer can replied in a slow, morose tone.
“Uh!” I silenced him. “Don’t jinx us, Skippy. Poole, lower that thing to us, and we’ll test it.”
We waited for Poole to return to the walkway, then we retreated into the comparative safety of the tunnel before attaching the soot-stained conduit to power leads. “Ok, Skippy, do your thing,” I ordered as I crouched in the tunnel, my armored back to the conduit out on the walkway. If the damned thing exploded, I didn’t want anyone becoming injured. “Skippy?”
He didn’t reply.
“Power circuit is active,” Captain Chandra advised. “Perhaps it worked, and Mister Skippy is now uploading himself?”
“I wish he’d warned us ahead of-”
Skippy cut me off. “No, Joe. No, I’m not in the upload process. It didn’t work. The stupid thing is burned out! That’s why the Elders didn’t bother removing it. What a piece of crap!”
For a long minute, no one spoke. No one knew what to say. Finally, Mychalchyk took one for the team by asking the obvious question. “Can you try it again?”
“Did that,” Skippy replied without being sarcastic, which told us how depressed he was. “Been trying it over and over. It’s hopeless. Joe, I’m afraid this is it; we are not going to find a conduit on Gingerbread.”
“We don’t know that, Skippy. This is only one tunnel-”
“It is the only tunnel where I thought we might find a conduit. Joe, while I appreciate you trying to cheer me up, we have a bigger, more immediate problem to deal with.”
“Like what?” I asked with a fearful glance at the walkway. The team was safely back in the tunnel, but if the walkway fell, it might collapse part of the tunnel with it.
“Like the maintenance system responsible for these tunnels is not happy about someone screwing with equipment down here,” he warned. “It activated when Poole began cutting into the housing. I didn’t tell you about it then, because the system didn’t do anything at the time. And because I figured once we got the conduit and I fixed myself, I could tell the maintenance system to shut itself down.”
“And now?”
“Now there are repair bots headed this way, and they are not going to be happy about unknown elements damaging their equipment. I suggest we retreat to the surface, pronto. If we can.”
“If we can?” Smythe didn’t wait for an order from me, he swung his faceplate down and unholstered his rifle.
“There are a dozen or more bots converging on this location,” Skippy explained. “I am calculating alternate escape routes, but getting past them may be tricky.”
Tricky was an understatement. Running with the enhanced speed provided by Kristang powered armor, we sped up the ramp, me getting dizzy from the centrifugal force of constantly banking to the right back up the spiral tunnel. On the way up, I counted the side tunnels, remembering eleven of them. Skippy had warned us they were all dead ends, but then so was the chamber behind us; there had been no way out of that spherical expanse. Of the eleven side tunnels, we made it past eight before we ran into an obstruction. That’s what Skippy called it; an obstruction. I called it a big Goddamned problem.
It was big, almost large enough to block the entire height and width of the tunnel. A maintenance bot. Elder bot design didn’t look significantly different from a comparable Thuranin unit; I suppose there are only so many ways to build a machine that needed to manipulate equipment. It moved on sort of tentacles that ended in feet or treads or suckers or maybe whatever was needed for the surface it was moving on. Above, from the midsection were manipulator arms. It didn’t seem to have a head or eyes; reddish lights covering its body were probably sensors including optical.
None of that mattered. What mattered was the bot was obstructing our only way back to the surface. Side to side it blocked the way completely, it was not extended to its full height so there were a couple meters of clear space above it. The thing was slowly moving toward us, jerking and lurching down the spiral tunnel. It creaked and screeched and whined, the sounds of an incredibly ancient machine still trying to fulfill its purpose.
The bot wasn’t the only problem, for behind the machine a thick door was sliding down from the roof of the tunnel. I hadn’t seen any such doors on the way down, but then I hadn’t been looking for them.
Smythe unslung his rifle and muzzled it toward the bot, seeking a vulnerable spot.
“Uh, Major Smythe, please lower your weapons,” Skippy requested in a loud voice.
“Lower- why?” Smythe never took his eyes off the lurching, advancing Elder bot.
“Because,” Skippy explained slowly, “right now you have a problem that a maintenance bot thinks you damaged some old, obsolete and abandoned equipme
nt. If you start shooting at a bot that is responsible for keeping this facility operational, you will have a much, much bigger problem.”
“I think he’s right, Major,” I said uncertainly.
Smythe inched backward as the bot slowly, haltingly advanced, its ancient joints creaking and screeching. “Do as the beer can says, lower your weapons,” Smythe ordered.
Ranger Mychalchyk pointed his rifle at the floor and pulled his finger away from the trigger, but he wasn’t happy. “No weapons? Sir, what are we supposed to use against this thing? Harsh language?”
“I’m working on it,” Skippy announced, annoyed. “Damn it, I can’t establish a connection. Somebody idiot-proofed these bots, and I’m apparently an idiot.”
Of all the attributes a good soldier needs, perhaps common sense is at the top of the list. Sergeant Adams did not wait for or request orders; she sized up the situation in the blink of an eye, and raced forward without hesitation. As she got within one power-lengthened stride of the bot and it crouched defensively to avoid a collision, she leaped up, scraping the top of her helmet and the back of her suit along the tunnel ceiling. When she came down, she was moving fast and out of control, spinning and rolling along the floor, bashing against the walls. Before she even crashed to a stop she waved an arm and called “I’m Ok! Come on!”
My own common sense needed an upgrade, because I did hesitate, standing in place as the bot resumed its jerky advance. As I turned to give orders to Smythe behind me, I felt myself being roughly grabbed by two Rangers who must have recently received a booster shot to their common sense. They lifted me up as I yelped in protest, then before I could react, Poole and Mychalchyk swung me back then tossed me underhand, soaring through the air with my arms flailing and legs windmilling. Thanks to my clumsy and stupid actions, my left foot clipped one of the bot’s manipulator arms, sending me tumbling to come down hard on my helmet. I skidded on the helmet for a meter before a ridge on top of the helmet caught on some flaw in the tunnel floor, and my legs snapped forward.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 38
