by Sean Wallace
Only, a pilot-pod was more than just a chair.
“Whoever thought of mounting a chair on this ship?” Tiberiu asked on their first boarding of the Luceafarul. “Why would robots need to sit? They never get tired.”
“It’s not for the bots, but for us. We’re used to piloting in a seat and this will give us the right frame of mind to operate the ship through the bots. And if we happen upon a solar flare, the pod will reset the bot-units and recharge them. The pod also has a back-up communication system in case something happens.”
T-bot finally floated close enough to the floor to magnetize its feet and stick to it. Then he grabbed H-bot’s head and began to pull with all its mechanical strength.
Henri shifted his awareness into the pod. If he could presence into his backup bot in the storage hold under the navigation cabin, he’d be free of this incapacitated unit. Why couldn’t he remember the frequency? He’d trained for fast transfer, but those times he did, no one was trying to rip H-bot’s head from its socket.
Henri could see through H-bot’s eyes as its head came loose, with only a fragile cable still tethering the floating cranial unit to its body. The rogue bot needed two seconds to see the results of his efforts. It had to be now. Henri focused and coded in the frequency, praying that it was right.
Henri surged through the connection and two seconds later, he stirred in the darkness of the storage hold, and flexed the mechanized fingers of his backup robot. He slid the battery button to full function, tapping into Bot-2’s Karpen Pile. Henri gave a sigh of relief. He still had a working bot on Luceafarul. He hadn’t lost the ship yet, and if he were to keep it that way, there were things that needed to be done planetside first.
Returning to the Navibot Sphere, Henri opened his eyes. His helmet was dripping with sweat and his eyes felt like they were covered with spider webs. He gulped for air and felt the cosmo-jockeys helping him out of the straps. Once safely on the ground, he grabbed the first jockey’s arm. “I need Cuza here, now!”
Henri struggled to his feet, pulled off his drenched shirt and threw it out of the Sphere. Then he pressed the connect button on the intercom: “Oversees, we have a problem.”
“Henri, you shouldn’t have presenced back. Ana said—” Marcela was still in charge of flight control oversight. Her voice was now firm and professional. Could that mean Tibi was out of danger? Or did it mean she played the iron lady she needed to be to hold the mission together, for the sake of her husband and her father?
“ Luceafarul is under enemy control. I repeat, Luceafarul has been compromised.”
Grigore stepped in, his face darkened and confused. “What did you say?”
“Ilie, our machinist, presenced into T-bot while Tibi was still in it. That’s why Tibi had the seizure.” Henri inhaled and leaned against the Sphere’s soft wall. “Ilie’s destroyed H-bot, but I managed to transfer into my backup. For now, our enemy doesn’t know I still have a way onboard the Luceafarul.”
Grigore sputtered. “Ilie betrayed us? Who’s he working for?”
“No time to debate that. I need everybody to listen carefully. Oversees, what’s the time left on the clock?” Henri put on the new shirt that a cosmo-jockey brought him, and allowed the man to button it up for him.
“One hour thirty-seven minutes to fall over the horizon.”
“Good. Enough time if we move fast and precise.”
“What’s to be done?” asked Grigore.
“Ilie’s experienced, but not as practiced as Tiberiu or me. Nobody else should be able to ride T-bot but Tibi. The robotic brain’s mirrored after his mind. Anybody else trying to presence in should be rejected.”
“But Ilie managed to presence into T-bot nonetheless?” said Grigore in disbelief.
“Each bot-unit has a sub-brain that allows maintenance access. I suspect Ilie had tampered with T-bot’s. The sub-brain shouldn’t be able to control the bot a hundred percent, but it can still be used to issue simple commands like moving and pressing buttons. Enough to navigate the ship.”
Grigore was fuming. “Unbelievable!”
“Ilie couldn’t do this without outside help. He needs someone who can calculate new flight paths, and someone who can back him up here.”
Marcela cut in over the intercom. “To be able to pirate the radio signal, Ilie could only be using the Radio Tower or had a secondary transmitter built on a very high point nearby. The closest summit to us is twenty kilometers south in the Bucegi Mountains, which is too far. We need to send teams to check the facility.”
“Do it,” Grigore said.
Henri stood. “Grigore, I bet his accomplice had destroyed our backup electrical generator and he’s waiting for the right moment to cut off the power. They hijacked T-bot exactly two hours before our control window closes, when Romania’s position will not allow us to stay in contact with the ship. That means they don’t want to destroy the ship, but to bring it back into orbit where the foreign power can keep it out of our reach.”
Marcela interrupted again. “They need at least ninety minutes to turn the ship onto a path where we can’t re-link. After that they can cut the power and leave us in the darkness while they can retreat with everything they got from us.”
Grigore swore and punched the cushioned wall.
Henri lay a hand gently on Grigore’s back. “We don’t have time for anger, Grigore. I need you.”
“I’m here, Henri. I’m here.”
“Good. Send men to every point where a spy could cut off the power. Not only in our base but outside too, on the entire mountain and especially in Brasov. Tell them to take the spies by surprise, so they can’t alert anyone.”
Grigore hurried out of the Sphere.
“Oversees,” Henri continued, “get in contact with Dr Odobleja and ask him if there’s a way to stop Ilie’s control over T-bot.”
“But Dr Odobleja is at the psychocybernetics conference in Vienna!”
“Our success depends on it, Marcela.”
Henri turned to one of the jockeys. “My training bot, in Bay Two. Prepare it.”
Henri presenced into the training robot, the serum from his previous injection still effective for a short-distance connection such as this. He stepped outside of the Spheres Facility inside O-bot, adjusting to the lack of lag planetside. As a reflex he paused to breathe in the mountain air, but of course O-bot could neither transmit back a scent-signal or fill Henri’s lungs. The Launching Center perched atop Mount Timpa, above the city of Brasov. In the gloaming, the city was a sea of flickering lights landlocked by the black woolly mountainscape, and the road down the forested slopes was a slither of electric lamps. No motion in the Center’s yard. Everybody here was either inside the Spheres Facility, or inside the Oversees Building.
Henri steered O-bot around the Spheres Facility, a huge concrete cupola without windows. The Facility was back to back with the Oversees Building, a magnificence combining the graceful vertical Art Deco lines and the honeycomb pyramidal style inspired by Henri’s latest invention, the beton-bois. This type of prefabricated structures was meant to make house construction affordable to a wider array of social classes.
He stopped in front of the Radio Tower. O-bot’s eyes zoomed in to the top of the structure, and caught sight of something close to the pinnacle. Ingenious – Ilie had actually built a camouflaged nest there right under their noses, a small-scale replica of the Navibot Sphere, practically a tin ball fixed in a wooden frame and tied with wires inside the Tower’s structure. The saboteurs were more resourceful than he imagined.
O-bot began climbing the steel tower, not a difficult prospect for a robot that could magnetize its feet. Although initially the saboteurs’ hideout sounded clever, it now seemed dumb to Henri. It was too easy. They needed two hours to make their plan work. How could they stay uninterrupted when they were so easy to spot—
Henri heard a click under O-bot’s right hand and stopped abruptly. A wire ran up and up to the middle of the tower. O-bot’s eyes saw cl
early that wires had been attached to the entire metal frame, connected to firing mechanisms for smaller charges meant to set off the larger payload: the bomb clamped to the girders. If O-bot were to let go of its right hand, the first charge would detonate, and in a matter of seconds, the entire tower would topple, possibly crushing the buildings beneath.
If the Radio Tower fell, the mission to the Moon would fail. If Ilie couldn’t steal the Luceafarul, he was willing to sacrifice himself to prevent anyone from saving the cosmoship. Henri wondered what kind of debt or pressure had driven Ilie to such madness. He never took the time to get to know Ilie, he realized. And now his neglect could cost them everything.
Henri clamped O-bot’s hand to the frame so it wouldn’t release and detonate the charge. Likewise he locked the robot in place on the girders so that it wouldn’t move, even when Henri presenced out. Then he decerebralized from O-bot’s brain and woke up back in the Navibot Sphere.
“Damn!” He ripped the helmet off his head and dropped out of his harness. The two cosmo-jockeys ran to his side, but he pushed them away.
“Henri, you were right. The backup generator’s destroyed beyond repair,” said Grigore, re-entering the chamber. Despite everything, Grigore still looked impeccable: not a wrinkle in his suit or dust on his spectator shoes. But his face fell upon seeing Henri. “What happened?”
“I found them. They’re in the Radio Tower. Unfortunately they rigged the tower to blow. We can’t risk climbing the damn thing.”
“We’ll find another way, Henri.” Grigore sighed. “Even if it means I have to grow wings and fly up there.”
Henri grinned. “Smart man.”
“What?”
“We need a hot-air balloon. If we can’t scale that tower, we can certainly float up to that bastard’s nest and pluck him out of there.”
Grigore went from enthusiasm to panic between blinks. “Where am I supposed to find a hot-air balloon?”
“Steal a dirigible from the city, if you have to.” Henri switched on the intercom. “Oversees, what do we have left on the clock?”
“One hour and twenty-two minutes,” came Marcela’s reply. “Dr Odobleja said to tell you, Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are you, once and for all? What does that mean?”
Silence. Everyone looked expectantly at Henri. Henri sighed. “Odobleja, you bastard. Couldn’t you be more cryptic?” No time to ask for clarification. He donned the helmet, offering his neck for the next injection. “Strap me in again, boys. I’m going back to Luceafarul.”
As he drifted into his trance, Henri thought he heard Ana’s voice protesting over the intercom. Heart attack. Seizure. Phantom trauma. She was right: any of those might kill him. But the world needed Grigore’s dream of space, and of peace.
He presenced forth, ready to retake his ship.
Back inside Bot-2, Henri floated through the cargo hold slowly. The ship was airless and would carry no sound, but vibration remained a cue that might alert his foe. He still had the element of surprise, and he might as well use it. If only he could find something, anything, that could help him. No ideas yet, but if he kept searching, something might inspire him.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are you, once and for all? What did Odobleja mean by that? Was it something to do with the psychocybernetic brains that might give him an advantage?
Henri stopped and stared at Bot-2’s faint reflection in the chrome pane of the Lunar cart. He switched on the forehead lamp, and the metal brightened. He could see Bot-2’s reflection in the mirror-like surface, in great detail. He knew what Odobleja wanted to tell him.
Scientific knowledge wasn’t adequate enough to build an autonomous intelligence inside a robot, but Odobleja invented the next best thing – bots that could be piloted through a displaced awareness via radio signals. Ana Aslan’s serum had made the cerebralization process, or presencing, possible. The bots’ brains worked more or less the same as human brains, in that a robotic brain could control the robot only because there was a personal image that matched its many parts. The moment that self-image changes, the brain starts transmitting distorted and misfired signals. Henri had an idea of what Odobleja wanted him to do, but would it work?
Henri unlocked the hatch that led out of the storage hold and into the navigation room. He reviewed the details he needed to incapacitate T-bot. The distance to the pods from the hatch; where the reset switch was on the base of T-bot’s head. The reset only worked on the bot’s primary brain, not the maintenance sub-brain. However, it would at least take the sub-brain off-line for ten seconds. Enough for Henri to accomplish his true goal – wake up T-bot’s main and true identity.
The moment he sprung the hatch, Henri had only two seconds before any visual cues would be sent back to Earth, and two seconds for the saboteur to do something about it through T-bot. Four seconds to get to the bot and flip its reset switch. He could do it in two, given how small the navigation room was. No way in hell could he miss this chance.
Bot-2 opened the hatch and burst through the opening, magnetizing his feet and locking onto the metal floor. One second. He made the two steps to the pods in another second-and-a-half, and stretched out his hand to flip the switch.
Nothing happened.
Three seconds had passed, and T-bot was still running its activities without reacting to Bot-2’s ruckus. But at the same time, the reset switch wasn’t . . . there anymore? It was, but it was covered up with tape! Ilie had actually thought about the reset switch and had taken measures to make it inaccessible.
Next second – T-bot turned in Bot-2’s direction. Henri was out of time.
Bot-2 reached in front of T-bot, who tried to stop him but four seconds too late. Henri reached above the porthole and grabbed the photo of Tiberiu, Marcela, and their daughter. Tibi’s personal touch, his real presence aboard the Luceafarul. Henri taped it on the flight board in front of T-bot. He was just in time. T-bot smashed into Bot-2 and threw him through the hatch, back into the cargo hold. Pain flared in Henri’s chest. Was this the phantom pain the doctor warned him about?
Before Henri could re-orient Bot-2, the hatch closed and locked from the navigation side. Ilie had initiated the emergency protocol for dumping the cargo hold. Henri’s photo-identity ploy had failed.
Damn.
The cargo container shook violently as the first set of clamps released. Henri looked wildly around for an escape. The second set of clamps disengaged and the module separated from the ship.
No, no, no. Henri raced to open the hatch to the outside, and clambered out. He hooked the carabiner of his safety line into one of the handles embedded in the main hull just before the hold was jettisoned away from the Luceafarul.
His bot now floated a few meters behind the Luceafarul, towed at the end of its safety line. Henri could cry right now – this had been Tibi’s idea for the bots’ safety while working outside the ship, if the need arose. Sweet, thoughtful Tibi.
Henri’s thoughts faltered. All is not lost.
The view was incredible – on one side of him was the Earth, perfect and glowing like nobody could ever have guessed, not the ancient Greeks, not Galileo, not even the modern astronomers. It was simply breathtaking. Then there was the graceful shape of the cosmoship Luceafarul, a sleek silver angel seemingly motionless in its flight away from the dark and beautiful Moon.
Henri knew he was almost out of time. This was a fight for young people like Tibi, not dinosaurs like him. He made Bot-2 pull itself back to the Luceafarul, engage its electromagnetic feet, and cling to the hull. He mulled his options. The pilot-pod might be his last chance.
Bot-2 clambered atop the ship, slowly, grasp after step after grab, until it stopped next to the emergency control panel for the grand Karpen Pile that powered the Luceafarul, the undying heart that could sustain the cosmocraft to the end of time. Henri had helped Vasilescu-Karpen mount this model in the ship. He hoped he remembered his way around it well enough to execute his plan.
He unbolted the protective
panel with a spanner-extension hidden in Bot-2’s wrist tool kit and took a look inside. It wasn’t very complicated, yet extremely fragile if exposed. There was a two-second lag, Henri reminded himself, counting his steps again. He removed Bot-2’s secondary battery and disconnected the wires, and attached it to the Pile’s control panel. Wiring the first cable to one of the connectors to the ship, Henri then wrested a red wire from the cosmoship’s Karpen Pile, the one that he’d been warned to always keep completely isolated from the others. He pulled another wire free from his backup battery. Henri prayed that this would trigger an over-current that might supercharge the pods and take T-bot offline.
He brought the two bare ends into contact.
Sparks flared in the darkness of space.
Did it work?
The only way to check was to get back inside. If T-bot had been reset, it would take five minutes for it to gain full functionality. But if it hadn’t, then it would be Henri versus Ilie, cosmonaut versus saboteur, in a final showdown.
Henri opened the external hatch and slid inside, closing the opening behind him. He waited a few seconds, then spun open the hatch to the navigation room, ready to fight.
T-bot was still in its pod. No noise, no movement. A trap?
He floated quietly to the pods and grabbed T-bot by the arms, hoping to immobilize them. T-bot didn’t react. It was dead. Henri sighed, magnetized Bot-2’s feet and re-taped the photo onto the window right in front of T-bot’s eyes.
He unbolted H-bot’s dismembered hulk from its pod, tethered it out of the way, and inspected the flight board. T-bot had been in the middle of introducing the last adjustment calculations received from Earth.
Henri canceled the previous path. The clock had been set to countdown the time until the fall over horizon event, when Romania would be on the other side of the globe and the ship and its bots would be out of contact with the human pilots. Twelve minutes left. Henri re-established radio contact with Oversees.
