Stranded

by James Alan Gardner

  She had been hiding behind Alyssa, obviously hoping that the grain and Alyssa’s pant legs would conceal her. They didn’t. The robot insects—the leeches—plunged down, hitting Eve’s silver surface with five metallic tings. Eve rolled, trying to shake the bugs off; they hung on, sprouting sharp-tipped hooks that pierced Eve’s skin like claws. Eve shrieked and rolled over, as if she hoped to crush the leeches under her weight . . . but she was not that heavy, and the field’s soft soil simply yielded as she pressed the leeches against it.

  Abruptly, Eve went still: silent and unmoving. But Alyssa could hear whirring and she thought she knew what it meant—the leeches were drilling through Eve’s silver skin, trying to reach the electronics inside her. If they could invade her circuits, they could hack into her hardware and reprogram everything about her.

  “No way,” Alyssa said.

  She knelt beside Eve and took hold of a leech. It was more like a beetle than a soft-fleshed bloodsucker: the size of Alyssa’s thumb with a hard rounded shell of dark metal. Alyssa dug at it, working to get her fingernails between the shell and Eve’s skin. After a moment, she succeeded; then she twisted and pried until the leech came loose with a grinding crunch. Part of the leech stayed behind, like a bee’s stinger stuck in a wound—the hooks and the drill that had spiked into Eve, plus a few dangling wires thinner than hairs. Alyssa wondered if she should pluck the remaining debris, but decided against it. The tiny drill had stopped moving, and was no longer a threat.

  As fast as she could, Alyssa wrenched off the other four leeches. She tore a fingernail on Leech Number Four, but kept going. Each time she pulled a leech free, some of its innards broke away and stayed embedded in Eve. Eve was left with leech-sized scars on her previously pristine surface: small holes with leech parts in them, and dents where the leeches had rammed themselves into Eve’s metal. The dents left distortions on Eve’s silvered surface, like the warps in carnival mirrors.

  When all of the leeches were detached, Alyssa began picking at the fragments still planted in Eve’s skin. The hooks and drills refused to come out—they were firmly lodged in the silver—but after a minute, Eve began to vibrate. Alyssa pulled her hands away; two seconds later, Eve shot off across the field, flattening stalks of wheat as she barreled over them. The robot stopped a dozen paces away and emitted a piercing screech.

  “It’s okay,” Alyssa called, “it’s over. Are you all right?” She was afraid to get too close when Eve was distraught—Spymaster may have said that Eve had no weapons, but Alyssa didn’t think Spymaster was as smart as he thought.

  “I am not all right!” Eve cried. Her voice was unrecognizable: scratchy and harsh on the ear. “I am damaged, child. And unlike you, I do not heal. I’ll be scarred for the rest of my days!”

  “Don’t get mad at the sickie,” Spymaster said. He popped into visibility, hovering halfway between Alyssa and Eve. “She was the one who saved you.”

  “I know,” Eve snapped. “I also know that the Lorelei has never bothered me before. Yet as soon as I involve myself with this child, the leeches attack.”

  “Who or what is the Lorelei?” Alyssa asked.

  “A robot hacker,” Spymaster said. “She manufactures leeches and sends them to reprogram other robots. She and the General are . . . not on good terms anymore. But look on the bright side,” Spymaster said to Eve. “Whatever the Lorelei wants, the General wants the opposite. So if the Lorelei damages you, the General will fix you back up just to spite her. He can do that—he has all kinds of fabricating machines to make whatever new parts you need.”

  “And he’d repair me without asking anything in return?”

  “Sure. Maybe. Okay, probably not,” Spymaster admitted. “He’ll likely ask you to do him a favor.”

  “No way,” Eve said. “I survive by staying out of squabbles. Especially ones between the General and the Lorelei.”

  “You survive by burying yourself underwater,” Spymaster said. “Not much of a life, if you ask me. I think you’ve finally got tired of it—you decided to help the sickie instead of continuing to hide. Am I right?”

  Eve didn’t answer. After several seconds of silence, Alyssa said, “If the General can cure Balla, I still have to see him.”

  “He’ll ask you for a favor too,” Eve said.

  “Probably,” Alyssa agreed. “But I have to save Balla.” She turned to Spymaster. “Will we meet more leeches?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “The little pests take a long time to build, so the Lorelei never has many on hand. She must be furious that you broke these; whatever leeches she has left, she’ll keep them away from you. You’re the only thing on this station the leeches can’t affect.”

  “Then I’m lucky,” Alyssa said, not feeling lucky at all. “Can we get moving again?”

  “Sure,” Spymaster said. “It’s not far now. Are you coming, Eve, or are you going back to hide in your wallow?”

  The wounded silver robot was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I’ll come with you . . . or rather, I’ll stick with the child. As you say, the leeches will steer clear of her. Staying by her side is safer than trying to get home, especially if the Lorelei is in a temper.”

  —————

  The General was housed in an underground bunker. A ramp led down into the complex; Alyssa noticed that the ramp must have once been a stairway, since the emerald green paint on the walls didn’t quite go all the way to the ramp. The paint stopped above the ramp’s surface and showed the outline of stair steps. Some powerful grinding machine must have gouged the stairs flat to allow wheeled robots to come and go.

  The ramp emptied into a corridor lined with open doorways. The first two doorways were occupied by sentries: armored behemoths who filled the entire rooms beyond the doors. Each sentry aimed a cannon out into the corridor, but not the kind of cannon that shot shells. Lasers? Something else? Alyssa couldn’t tell. As she passed, the sentries tracked her with red targeting beams shone at her head, but they took no action—either the General had given permission for her to pass, or the sentries didn’t think she could possibly pose a threat.

  Other sentries were posted along the route forward: deadly-looking war machines, large and small. Alyssa held her hand over Balla’s speaker in a vain attempt to muffle him. (“Haughty, haul, haunches, haunt . . .”) His voice was the only sound audible, except for Alyssa’s own footsteps and the occasional tink of Eve’s damaged surface rolling over the floor.

  They went down two more ramps, deep enough that Alyssa could feel herself get heavier—the farther you got from the station’s axis of spin, the more that centrifugal force weighed you down. Descending three floors wasn’t much of a change, and perhaps under normal circumstances, Alyssa wouldn’t have noticed the difference. In her weakened condition, however, she felt everything grow heavier: her clothes, her body, Balla . . .

  It took all her strength to keep moving forward. She wished she had someone to lean on . . . but all she had was a sick aut getting heavy on her arm, a spy-drone so light he could pass for a toy, and a pockmarked silver ball that only came up to her knee. She couldn’t lean on any of them—not physically or metaphorically. As for the General, if he could heal Balla, she’d be wonderfully grateful even if there were strings attached; but Alyssa had already decided not to trust him. Too many things felt wrong.

  Spymaster led the way to a room with huge video screens on all four walls. Only one of the wall-screens was working; the others were labeled AMERICAS, EURASIA, and INDIAN RIM, but they were black and lifeless. The remaining screen was labeled SANCTUARY; it showed multiple views of the space station’s interior. Alyssa recognized a shot of the hospital, a field that she’d walked through, and the sun shining through the central strip of glass. Other pictures on the screen showed plain concrete buildings as well as an array of solar-collector panels and an expanse of water.

  Positi
oned in front of the active screen was a towering machine painted gold. It reminded Alyssa of the complicated projector she’d seen in a planetarium: basically a long cylinder, but with numerous attachments, protrusions, rotating sections, and lenses twisting in and out. This robot had eight arms of varied lengths and thicknesses, each tipped with a different type of hand—everything from a giant set of lobster pincers, to a paw with three drill-like fingers, to what looked like a real human hand . . . a woman’s hand, fine boned and delicate, as if amputated from a princess. The sight of it made Alyssa shudder.

  “This is the General,” Spymaster said.

  The eight-armed machine didn’t turn to face them; its attention remained focused on the vid-screen. However, lenses on its back corkscrewed out of its body and tilted down at Alyssa. Small blue lights flared to life down the length of the robot’s body, illuminating Alyssa and her companions in their glow.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” the General said in a mellow male voice. It struck Alyssa as the voice of someone who greets people for a living, like the man who escorts you to a table in an upscale restaurant—a sugary voice filled with cream.

  “Hi,” said Alyssa. “I’m Alyssa and this is Balla.” She held up her arm and turned her wrist back and forth, letting Balla’s silver chains reflect glints from the General’s lights. “He’s caught the same disease I had. Can you help him?”

  “I will make every effort,” the General said in his creamy voice. “I have a soft spot for auts—our peaceful cousins, friendly and helpful, humbly accepting their lowly lives.” The General paused. “Unfortunately . . .”

  He let the word hang. Finally Alyssa said, “Unfortunately what?”

  “The Lorelei has picked this moment to make a nuisance of herself. Her leeches attacked you, did they not? I can see poor Eve was grievously gored. It’s tragic really, the way the Lorelei lashes out. I expect she’s heard the talk from Earth about sending us into the sun, and she’s reacting in senseless fury. Venting her rage at the only target in reach: me. As I say, it’s tragic—a demonstration of her inferior design.”

  The General lowered his voice confidentially. “Her side in the war was invested in emotion—ideological loyalty, patriotism, demonization of the enemy. Tsk. So ugly. Her programming makes her waste resources against me, when really, we ought to be joining our intellects to solve our mutual problems . . . like your disease.”

  “Yes, but can you cure Balla or not?” Alyssa asked.

  “I believe I could have—after all, I cured you. But minutes ago, the Lorelei’s minions broke into the hospital and stole materials needed for the treatment. I can’t do anything to help poor Balla until we get those back.”

  “Why would she steal the cure?” Alyssa asked. “What good does it do her?”

  “Perhaps she merely wished to hurt me,” the General said. “Perhaps she plans to use what she has as a bargaining chip—she knows that the cure is the key to saving this station, so she may demand concessions from me to get back what she stole. Or perhaps she intends to negotiate with Earth herself; she may offer humanity the cure in exchange for something she wants.”

  The General made an artificial sighing sound. “I really can’t say what she’s up to. I am a creature of logic, untainted by irrational impulses. The Lorelei is my direct opposite—deliberately so. Her designers wished to build something whose behavior I could not predict despite my great processing power.”

  “Oh please,” Eve muttered. “What a load of—”

  “What was that, Eve?” the General asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Alyssa said, “Spymaster told us you could repair Eve’s damage—what the leeches did to her.”

  The General’s lenses swiveled in Eve’s direction, extending outward as they focused on the leech scars. “Yes,” he said, “those injuries can be patched. I’d be happy to do so, once this business with the Lorelei has been resolved.”

  “How do you intend to resolve it?” Eve asked.

  “That’s the problem,” the General said. “Those things she stole from the hospital—she might have hidden them anywhere. The only way to find them is to get to the Lorelei herself. Alas, she’s protected by leeches, making it dangerous for my aides to approach her. Furthermore, she’s taken refuge in a bunker as fortified as this one. My troops have sufficient firepower to blast her into slag, but such an assault would be a disaster for this station’s biosphere, and might even blow a hole into space. As for the materials needed for the cure . . . if she has those with her, they’d be obliterated. Intelligent though I am, I see no way to recover what we need. Except . . .”

  “Except what?” Alyssa knew she’d hate the answer.

  “Except if you volunteer to confront the Lorelei yourself,” the General told her. “You, Alyssa, cannot be harmed by leeches. You might succeed where the mightiest robots would fail.”

  “The mightiest robots are bulletproof. I’m not. If the Lorelei’s bunker has guards like this one, I’ll be shot the moment I walk in the door.”

  “You won’t be walking in,” the General said. “You’ll be captured by the Lorelei’s minions; they’ll carry you into her lair.”

  Alyssa stared at the General; though he had no human features, somehow the big gold-painted machine radiated smug self-satisfaction. In the silence, Balla whispered, “Mesmerize, meson, mess.”

  “So I get brought to the Lorelei; then what? I douse her with water and she melts into brown sugar?”

  “I will give you a device that will let you deal with her.”

  Alyssa snorted. “Unless the Lorelei is stupid, she’ll have her guards search me and take away any devices.”

  “The device will be disguised,” the General assured her. “It will not be taken from you. Trust me.”

  “Two minutes ago, you said the Lorelei was too irrational to predict. Now you’ve got this plan you’re sure will fool her. Does that add up?”

  “Dear girl, the time has come for calculated risks. People want to destroy this station: you, me, and everyone in it. A cure for the plague will save us all, but the Lorelei stands in the way. The stakes are too high not to take this chance . . . if not for your own life, then for your aut’s. And for all those humans frozen back in the hospital.”

  Alyssa sighed. She didn’t like the General, with his too-smooth voice and too-glib promises. On the other hand, what options did she have? Doing something was better than nothing.

  “Okay,” she said. She felt so tired. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  —————

  Five minutes later, Alyssa collapsed. She didn’t pass out completely; she just crumpled from fatigue. Her mind stayed clear enough to think, “I have to keep going. I have to save Balla.” But her body was running on empty.

  Before the plague, she’d always been strong: kept fit by swimming and her habit of leaping into anything that caught her interest. The disease had ravaged her . . . drained her. When she tried to get up, nothing happened. She would have screamed in frustration but she didn’t have the strength.

  A big robot appeared and carried her out of the General’s command room. The robot was banana yellow, a mass of chunky metal that bore her weight as if she were as light as a kitten. Its upper arms were polished steel pistons, but its forearms were padded and as soft as pillows. Alyssa wondered if the padding was expressly for her, so the robot wouldn’t hurt her. More likely, she thought, the robot was designed to handle nitroglycerine or something else so deadly, it had to be treated like eggshells.

  Alyssa didn’t really care. For the moment, she was happy to be handled gently . . . but she fought not to fall asleep. She couldn’t afford it, when she had so much to do.

  The yellow robot took her to a room lined with cupboards. It set her in a chair and opened a cupboard filled with cardboard cartons that reminded Alyssa of shoebo
xes. The robot took one down, slid open a side-flap, and drew out a plate of what looked like goulash: chunks of meat and wide flat noodles, slathered with gravy and covered with a plastic lid. The robot raised the plate to eye level and stared at it hard; for a moment, the robot’s huge right eye glowed red. The plastic lid suddenly clouded with steam. When the robot removed the lid, Alyssa could smell the wonderful aroma of fresh cooking.

  The robot set the plate in front of her. “Eat.” His voice was male. After a moment, he said, “Oh,” and picked up the carton again. He tipped out a small plastic fork and set it carefully beside the plate. “Eat.”

  The few minutes of rest had restored a bit of Alyssa’s energy—enough that she could use the fork to pick up a chunk of meat. She chewed it gratefully. Lamb. It likely hadn’t come from an actual animal—just simulated mock-meat made from vegetable protein. Mock-meat could last for years without going bad . . . and Alyssa suspected these rations had been sitting in the bunker since the Almost War.

  She didn’t care. It tasted good. And the protein would help Balla fight the disease. She ate it all.

  Near the end of the meal, Spymaster and Eve joined her. Eve’s injuries had been covered with metal tape—not a permanent fix, but it would offer short-term protection to her internal components. (Alyssa wondered whether the tape would stay stuck underwater. Probably not . . . which meant Eve couldn’t go home to her pool until the General repaired her completely.)

  “How are you feeling now, child?” Eve asked.

  “She good,” the big yellow robot replied. “Og feed her. Now girl all healthy. Og good cook, yes?”