“Well, you haven’t got much time,” Hosato observed grimly. “The things are in the main corridor to the mall.”
“Oh, lord!” Rick exclaimed, his eyes widening.
“That’s right. Sasha and her security team are trying to stall them, but they can’t hold them for long. We’re trying to work out an evacuation plan, but we’ll need your help. The spaceport’s gone, so we’ll have to use the sand crawlers. Where are they?”
“Through there.” Rick pointed to a door at the rear of the shop. “There’s an airlock at the far end of the garage that gives direct access to the surface area, but only one crawler is operational. The other one’s half apart for preventive maintenance. It’s scattered all over the garage.”
“How fast could you put it back together?”
The mechanic gnawed at his lip. “Half an hour if I had isome help,” he said. “But—”
“Suzi,” Hosato said, turning to his partner. “Go with Rick here and help him as much as you can.”
“Hey, I can’t take tune to train a Class Two…”
“I am a Class Eight robot,” Suzi replied coldly. “And am more than capable of following simple orders.”
“A Class Eight?” Rick looked at her speculatively. “Say, Hayama, what are you doing with a Class Eight?”
“Sshh!” Hosato held up a hand for silence, then beckoned the mechanic closer.
“What’s through that door?” he whispered, pointing to the ruined metal door af the side of the shop.
“The new corridor,” Rick whispered back. “It runs past the main computer building and comes out—”
Hosato motioned him to silence again, and they listened. Coming from the door was the muffled whine of motors moving toward them down the corridor.
“Get to work on the sand crawler.” Hosato whispered the order as he started sealing his Nirija suit.
“But what are you?” Rick began, then for the first time focused on the blaster in Hosato’s hand. “Hey, where did you get the blaster. And what’s with the funny outfit. Who are…?”
Hosato finished sealing the suit and vanished.
“I suggest we do as he says,” Suzi said to the stunned mechanic. “I’m sure he will explain later, if we get the time.”
Hosato didn’t delay to see the final resolution of Rick’s dilemma. He moved across the room in a smooth glide and stepped through the ruined doorway into the corridor.
There were three of them moving slowly down the corridor. He had never seen a robot try to “sneak” but guessed this was their attempt to duplicate that form of motion. At these speeds, their motors were next to noiseless. If Hosato had riot already been alerted and nervous, it is doubtful he would have heard them at all.
Instead of opening fire immediately, Hosato took a moment to plan his attack. In theory, he should have nothing to fear. His suit gave him invisibility and therefore invulnerability. If the robots’ camera eyes did not register a human form, they would not fire. Even his blaster was rigged to establish contact through his palm, and shared the same light-relay mechanism as his suit. He was totally invisible and safe—in theory. Of course, relying on theories was a sure way to guarantee an early retirement.
There was always the possibility that cameras were not the robots’ sole means of sensory input. Heat sensors, movement detectors, any one of a number of devices could detect his presence, and then he would be in a shoot-out with three machines that didn’t miss.
The robots were a scant fifteen feet away. His plan of action set, Hosato opened fire.
Standing off-center to the right of the corridor, he fired point-blank at the lead robot. Dropping to one knee, he fired again immediately at the robot at the rear of the formation. Not waiting to observe the results of his first two shots, he dived to his left, rolling to the side of the corridor, and from a prone position fired again at the final robot.
He rolled again, still prone, to the center of the corridor, and froze, studying his targets. Observing no sign of continued activity from the robots, he drew a deep breath and waited for his heartbeat to return to its normal pacing. Realization suddenly struck him. Between his second and third shots, the last robot had returned fire, the bolt from its blaster sizzling the air over Hosato as he rolled across the corridor.
He shot a quick glance behind him to check his retreat route. The smoldering body of a security guard lay just inside the door.
That’s what the robot had fired at. It was reacting to the security guard’s intrusion into the corridor. Had Hosato been on his feet, he would have been caught in the line of fire, invisible or not!
He suddenly saw another blaster being poked cautiously into the corridor, a blaster held by a hand with a uniform sleeve showing.
“Hold your fire!” he called, quickly breaking the seal on his suit.
He rolled to his feet and confronted the bewildered guard who cautiously followed the blaster into the corridor.
“How did you—?” the guard began.
“How do we get into the main computer building?” Hosato demanded.
“We can’t!” the guard responded automatically.
“Look, don’t you understand?” Hosato pressured. “If we can knock out that computer, the robots will be minus a brain. That’s where they’re being controlled from.”
The guard’s face hardened. “That’s a top-security area,” he recited. “Orders state that unauthorized personnel—”
Hosato almost hit the man in his frustration but gamed control of himself.
“Where’s Sasha?” he demanded. “We’ll get your orders changed right now.”
“The chiefs been hurt,” the guard informed him. “Just before we collapsed the main tunnel, she…”
But Hosato was gone, pushing his way into the maintenance shop. Chaos reigned in the shop. There were people packed into every available space, all shouting at each other. Bits of conversation came to Hosato as he made his way through the crowd.
“it’s got to be the main programming. They couldn’t just…”
“has been in the family for two hundred years, and you just…”
“the brains God gave an ant, you’d quite poking around in the mechanics and help us figure…”
“Billy Billy Maria, have you seen…?”
“long until they burn a new corridor, we’ve got to…”
He found her at last. She was lying on the floor. James was trying to keep the crowd from stepping on her, but with limited success.
“Hosato!” the boy cried, spying him as he covered the final distance through the press of bodies. “Sasha’s—”
“I heard,” he said, dropping to one knee beside the fallen security chief. “How is she?”
It was a rhetorical question, and he ignored the boy’s answer as he took in the situation at a glance. Sasha’s right arm was gone below the elbow. There was no bleeding, probably cauterized by the same blaster bolt that took her arm, but she was in deep shock.
“Carolyn’s dead,” James shouted in Hosato’s ear.
“Who?” he replied absently.
“Carolyn. The red-headed girl in your room. When we were…”
Someone, pushed backward by the crowd, walked directly across Sasha’s body. Hosato pushed savagely at the legs, then stood up, casting about desperately. A familiar face caught his eye.
“Doc!” he called.
The maintenance man was embroiled in an argument with a red-faced couple and didn’t respond. Hosato stretched out, got hold of his arm, and physically dragged him out of the conversation.
“We’ve got an injured person down here, Doc. Is there someplace we can take her where she won’t get trampled?”
“Try the garage. Rick chased everybody out of there while he was working on the crawler.”
“Thanks!” Hosato said, releasing his hold on the mechanic.
“Say,” the man asked, “are you headed back there?”
Hosato was scanning the crowd, trying to pick a path. “Yes,” he
replied absently.
“Can you take these to Rick?” the man said, forcing a wad of papers into Hosato’s hand. “Maybe he can make head or tails of them.”
“Sure,” Hosato acknowledged. “Come on, James.”
He stooped and picked Sasha up in his arms. Even with James breaking a path through the crowd, it was hard maneuvering. The door to the garage was worst of all. There were so many people in front of it Hosato had to momentarily set Sasha down and physically shove people away before he could get it open. As it was, he and James barely got Sasha through before the jostling crowd slammed the door shut behind them.
“I told you to stay out of… Oh, Hayama.” Rick emerged from under the sand crawler he was working on. “What’s… Oh, my God!”
“She’ll be okay,” Hosatc said, easing his burden to the ground. “How’s the work going?”
“Nearly complete,” Suzi pronounced, gliding into view from the far side of the crawler. “Another five minutes of uninterrupted work and the vehicle will be fully functional.”
“That’s right,” Rick confirmed. “That’s quite a 'bot you have there, Hayama. I’m going to have a whole shipload of questions for you when all this is over, but in the meantime…”
“Right,” Hosato responded. “I’ll get out of your way. Oh.” He suddenly realized he was still holding the wad of papers. “Here, Doc, said you should take a look at these.”
The mechanic took the bundle and frowned at it. “What are they?”
“I don’t know,” Hosato admitted. “Doc just said—” Their heads came around with a jerk. Muffled screams, mixed with the unmistakable sound of blaster fire, were coming from the door.
“My God,” Rick gasped'. They’re in the shop.”
“James. Get Sasha into the crawler. That one, the one that’s working. Suzi. Give him a hand.”
Hosato turned to Rick and lowered his voice. “Get this thing fired up and ready to roll. I’ll see if there’s anything we can do.”
Rick nodded and darted toward the controls of the working sand crawler, and Hosato turned toward the door.
The screams were redoubling. Unseen fists were pounding at the door to the garage. In a flash, Hosato realized what was happening. The door opened into the shop, and the panicked people were shoving against it, prevented by their own numbers from getting it open.
With a curse he ran to the door and threw his weight against it. Then he backed up and launched a flying double kick into the door.
The door didn’t budge an inch.
Hammering on the door, he tried shouting Instructions to the people on the other side. Finally he stopped, realizing the futility of his actions. Simultaneously he realized the screams from the shop were dying out, replaced by eerie silence and the sporadic sound of blasters.
He turned and sprinted for the crawler, fighting back the cold, sick feeling in his stomach.
Hanging over Rick’s shoulder, Hosato peered curiously at the piloting viewscreen as the sand crawler jolted its way across the rough terrain.
“How far is it to the Ravensteel complex?” he asked, swaying as the crawler plunged down another gully.
“Not far,” Rick assured him. “I’ve never been there myself, but I know we’re working opposite ends of the same mineral vein. I figure we should be there by morning… noon tomorrow at the latest.”
Hosato squinted skeptically at the viewscreen. “That’s pretty rough terrain out here.”
“Don’t worry. This baby’s built to run over this stuff.”
Rick’s faith in the vehicle seemed to be well-founded. It was like an exaggerated version of a tank — no, tanks had caterpillar treads, and this had huge balloon tires, eight of them, with independent suspension. More like a large version of an armored car. It was short and wide, with the rectangular crew housing perched in the center. Mounted forward of the housing was a pair of large pincer-arms as well as a small forest of lesser tool arms. The arms could be controlled from the driver’s seat with amazing dexterity and strength. The area to the rear of the housing was taken up by a small airlock that gave the operators access to the outside, should the work require the human touch. It was an impressive machine, but it was still a machine.
“Are you sure the main computer can’t take control of this thing?” Hosato asked nervously.
“Impossible,” Rick assured him.
“If you don’t mind my being blunt, that’s what everyone said about the idea of killer robots. Impossible, but it happened anyway.”
Rick sighed. “Look, are you worried about Suzi running amok?”
“No, but—”
“Well, there’s more chance of her being dominated by the computer than there is of this crawler being affected.”
Hosato shot a glance through the low door to the crew area, where James and Suzi were hovering over Sasha.
“Now, I didn’t mean you should get paranoid about Suzi,” Rick chided. “Look, Suzi’s capable of independent action, but she has no capacity for computer direction. And this crawler has no capacity for computer direction, and it isn’t capable of independent action. The only controls for this baby are right here in my hand, so don’t worry.”
Hosato hesitated a moment, but decided the embarrassment of admitting his ignorance was worth the information to be gained. “How does that differ from what happened back at the complex?” he asked.
“The security robots are like most of the robots we use: run by one central computer. They are free-moving, multifunction robots, but the decision-making and function cues were still left in the central computer.”
He stopped talking to concentrate on piloting the vehicle around a rock formation.
“So all the killer robots were being controlled from the central computer?” Hosato prompted, once the obstacle had been cleared.
“That’s right,” Rick confirmed. “Their activities were too complex and unified to be self-directed. The problem isn’t with the individuals units, it’s with the central computer.”
Hosato swore.
“What’s wrong?” his friend asked. “I had a chance to go after the central computer and passed it up. If I could have gotten to it—”
“—you wouldn’t be here,” Rick interrupted. “Sasha could probably tell you more about it than I can, but believe me, that thing’s protected. You don’t just walk up and turn it off. Incidentally, how is she doing back there, anyway?”
“I’ll check,” said Hosato, and ducked back to the crew area.
Sasha was lying on the floor, her eyes open. Her listless thrashing about constantly threatened to displace the blankets they had heaped on her.
“How is she doing?” Hosato asked.
James turned worried eyes up to him. “We’re trying to keep her covered, but she keeps—”
“They’ll burn through!” Sasha moaned suddenly, sitting up. “We need a bigger block. Collapse another twenty feet—”
“It’s all right, Sasha,” Hosato soothed, taking her by her shoulders and easing her back down.
“You don’t understand.” She turned vacant eyes to him. “They’ll burn through. We’ve got to stop them.”
“They’re stopped,” he assured her. “Everything’s all right. Get some rest, now.”
“Hosato?” She blinked at him. “Could you get a doctor. I think my right hand’s hurt. The fingers feel like they’re on fire.”
She tried to raise her right arm to look at it, but Hosato restrained her.
“Just get some rest. Everything will be all right.”
“Hayama. Come up here, quick!”
Hosato was momentarily torn by indecision.
“Take care of her, James,” he said finally, relinquishing his hold to the boy and starting forward.
“We’ve got problems,” Rick announced grimly as Hosato entered the pilot’s booth. “Watch the rear viewscreen there as we hit the top of this next rise.”
Hosato did as he was told. The moon was bright enough to throw shadows as he surve
yed the scene in the viewscreen. At first he saw nothing; then something moved in the center of the screen. A blob detached itself from a patch of shadows, then was obscured from sight as their crawler plunged into the next gully.
“What is it?” he asked tensely.
“The central computer’s sent one of the ore scouts after us.”
“What can it do?”
“Well, it’s got an industrial slicer as one of its tools, and an ore crane for another. It can pick us up or cut us apart, depending on its instructions. From what happened back at the complex, my guess is it’ll cut us apart.”
“Hosato!” James called from the back. “Can you give me a hand here?”
“In a minute, James,” Hosato called back.
“Say, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Rick said. “Is it Hayama or Hosato. The kid there keeps—”
“It’s Hosato. Can that thing catch us?”
“It’s faster than we are, but we’re almost out of range of the computer’s control radius.”
“Good.” Hosato sighed.
“Not so fast,” Rick retorted. “I said 'almost.' We’ve got another half-hour’s driving before we’re clear. It’ll be close, but it’ll probably catch us. Even if it doesn’t, it’ll be close enough to use its slicer on us.”
Hosato studied the pursuing vehicle as it came into view again.
“Where are the surface suits?” he asked finally.
“In the tall lockers back in the crew area. Why?”
But Hosato was already gone.
“Hosato—” the boy began, looking up.
“Not now, James,” Hosato mumbled, brushing past him. “We’ve got problems.”
“If I might suggest…” Suzi began, but Hosato ignored the robot.
“If anything happens, James,” he said, dragging the bulky surface suit from the locker and gathering it in his arms, “get in touch with the Hungarian. Suzi can tell you how to find him.”
“But—”
Hosato cut him short, calling ahead to Rick as he started for the cockpit again.
“Stop the crawler in the next gully!”
“What for?” the mechanic called back.
Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe Page 9
