Africa Zero (23 page)

The
battle from then on seemed to be all firing without very many people getting
hit. The ion bolts discharged through the crates, au-tohandlers and small
transports the sauramen hid behind, whilst the mercury shot they fired was easily
stopped by the same. No one seemed to be inclined to heroism. Everyone wanted
to stay alive. The fight could not continue like this though. We had limited
ammunition and the soldiers probably did not. We had limited numbers yet these
soldiers could be reinforced at any time. I guessed that they were the nearest
to the bay at which we docked, and that there would be others scattered all
over the station. I decided it was time for me to act. About ten metres from
where I crouched was an autohandler with grab arms and heavy forklift. Most of
the soldiers were crouched behind a row of packing cases, some blasted open to
expose the rough aluminium castings inside. The handler was just the job.

I
ran across the intervening area and leapt up behind the panel through which the
handler could be programmed. Feeling a touch of
deja vu
I reached under
the panel and tore away a bunch of optic cables. Two ionic bolts hit me one
after the other as I got hold of the panel, twisted it, and tore it away.
Underneath the panel I exposed the original manual controls and the servo
motors that operated them. I pulled the servo motors free. Another bolt hit me
and lines ran down my vision and there was a weird whistling in my ears. Using
the manual controls I turned the handler and had it pick up the nearest
convenient crate. With this positioned before me to absorb the bolts I looked
around at the crouching sauramen.

“Charge!”
I yelled, feeling slightly strange.

Sauramen
fell in behind the handler as I drove it at the line of crates. The handler
went through the line with a crash and the sauramen leapt up onto the scattered
crates and fired down at the soldiers. I leapt from my seat, up onto the crate
the handler had suspended three metres in the air, and opened fire from there.
Another ionic bolt hit me and caused random squares to appear in my vision and
the ringing in my ears turned to a steady thumping. I saw that the shot had
come from across the bay area, and that it was shots from there that were also
picking off my men. I leapt from the crate and hit the ground running. At the
bottom right of my vision a little red light was flashing. This meant that my
autorepair system had been activated. I rounded the small shuttle, from behind
which the shots had come, and charged straight into a group of four soldiers. I
went into them with my weapon on automatic. They hit me a couple of more times,
but to no avail. Their shots just put a few more squares across my vision. It
wasn’t really fair, but then whoever said life was?

The
remaining soldiers retreated down the corridors and escalators from the bay
area. There were about forty bodies scattered across the decking. The numbers
looked about even, but to my surprise I saw that some of them were stirring—the
sauramen. They were tough buggers. After a few minutes, while weapons were
collected and bodies checked, about half the sauramen had revived. It turned
out that the only ones dead were those that had been struck by three or more
ionic bolts. There was a number still unconscious. I had them taken back to the
lifter, before calling together the remainder of the sauramen and leading them,
down a wide escalator, to a precinct that led into the centre of the station.
The precinct was a tubular structure with sky-effect ceiling panels, lawns,
gardens and decorative pathways down its centre, and shops and restaurants down
the sides. It was deserted and I didn’t like it.

“You
can bet your life there are autoguns down here somewhere,” I said. Gurt nodded
in understanding—after being in my tanks he knew about autoguns. Sophist, who
was one of those to have recovered, did not know, and Gurt explained to her in
low tones. I removed the APW from my back and led them all to one side of the
precinct. Before me was a sign advertising ‘The Best Synthetastes This Side of
Jupiter’. On the menu was a list that included a ‘dinosaur meat selection,
trilobite thermador, and human flesh’. I did a double-take at the first and the
last on the list.

On
a low setting I used the APW to take out the tinted window of the restaurant.
The small blast cut a hole the size of a head through the glassite, then as the
chain molecules unravelled, the whole window fell as a sheet of dust.

“Come
on,” I said, leading them in. “We go round.”

The
restaurant was all hexagonal tables and bucket chairs. As we moved through, a
floating vendor shaped like an ancient one-armed bandit came directly towards
me.

“Tables
for one hundred and three, sir?” it asked, before a broad-bladed spear struck
it and set it tumbling through the air trailing wisps of smoke.

“Table
bzzzp. Drink bzzzp. Let me clean that up bzzzp,” it said, repeatedly as it
tumbled. We moved to the back wall of the restaurant.

“This
should do,” I said, and shifted up the setting on my APW. I didn’t know what
was behind this wall, though I thought it likely not to be living quarters.
With a flash and crash the back wall of the restaurant buckled and blasted
away. Beyond it the dust of its disintegration settled on the automachines of a
manufactory. Here were the computer-controlled mills, lathes, presses that have
been an indispensable part of industry since industry began. The sauramen
looked with suspicion at the machines, but there were no thrown spears as in
the restaurant. We moved down aisles wide enough for us to walk three abreast,
but which had been designed for maintenance and material-loading robots. This
was not a place where people would very often come. Anything anyone wanted made
would first be constructed, viewed, and tested in a computer in the comfort of
someone’s apartment or office. The instructions would then come down here by
optic cable and the machines would do the work.

The
manufactory ended at another main-section wall in which were wide sliding doors
and a simple door control. There was no need for me to blow another hole.
Beyond these was a huge materials store, with racked bars and ingots of
machinable metals, ceramics, plastics, glasses, and a thousand other materials
with numbers rather than names. I warned the sauramen to be wary now. We had
not gone the way expected, but by now more soldiers would have been moved to
intercept us. I was not wrong.

On
the treble-click, sauramen were diving for cover amongst the stacks of
materials. The twin barrels of the machine gun filled the room with ricocheting
flack bullets. Flinders and fragments tore in every direction. Two sauramen had
no time to get to cover and simply flew apart. Before a round struck me square
in the forehead, and I staggered and fell backwards over a stack of bearing
cases, I saw that the twinned guns had been mounted on one of the maintenance
robots, and that soldiers were coming in behind it. As I hit the ground I
managed one shot before the APW was torn from my hand, its casing smashed. The
robot ground to a halt, half its side blasted away. Momentarily the guns were
firing at the ceiling, then they swivelled down concentrating their fire on me.
They were remotely-controlled and whoever was controlling them knew who their
greatest danger was. Bearing cases crashed all around me and multiple hits slid
me back across the floor. My syntheflesh covering was stripped from my torso
and my arms as I tried to rise. I didn’t see her do it. I had too many problems
of my own at that moment. It was Sophist who leapt up onto a stack of copper
ingots and fired an entire box down on the twinned guns. She shut them down,
but in repayment was cut in half by Optek fire.

In
the bloody scramble that followed I realised I had made a big mistake. No one
in command on a station would allow soldiers to carry weapons that might
penetrate the hull. There would be no APWs or hard rounds, no pulsed-energy
weapons or high intensity lasers, but there would be weapons capable of
stopping me. I considered pulling out then, but thought it unlikely we would be
able to get the lifter away. We had to carry on. I had to use my abilities to
their fullest extent.

While
the fire-fight continued, I stood then ran to where the soldiers were taking
cover. I used no weapon but myself. Optek fire and ionic bolts struck me
repeatedly. My autorepair system went wild with error messages. I reached three
soldiers crouching behind a rack of metal bars, snatched an Optek from one and
used it to brain the other two, then picked the other one up and threw him at
some of his fellows who had rushed to help. Four men went down in a tangle. I
dragged a copper alloy bar from the rack and walking with it held as a staff I
advanced on others who had taken cover. The ionic bolts that hit me now mostly
discharged down through the bar into the floor. Optek fire put me out of
balance as it stripped away my outer covering, but the bullets ricocheted off
my ceramal skeleton. After the next group of soldiers I stepped away with the
bar bent and running with gore. My sauramen came in after me. The soldiers started
to realise then that their weapons had little effect on me and that hiding was
no use. I suppose I killed about forty of them in the next ten minutes. I don’t
like to examine those memories too closely. Suffice to say that soon they were
running for their lives, many of them abandoning their weapons.

“Come
on!” I yelled to my small army, and they followed. I got some strange looks
from them as I tore away fragments of syntheflesh that still clung, to reveal
the me underneath. What they saw was a metal skeleton with white teeth and,
when my shutters came up, lidless grey eyes. My rib cage is a solid thing in
which most of my systems are contained, and my spine a column ten centimetres
in diameter.

We
charged to the end of the materials store after the retreating soldiers, then I
took them away from that course down service corridors and through a
hydroponics section. Beyond this there was more resistance in the form of
another twinned machine flack gun. I took them away from this to a central
point where the drop shafts had been shut down. All around were corridors and
maintenance tunnels spreading into many hydroponics sections. Here I decided
what I must do and turned to them.

“You’ve
got me this far, and from here I must continue alone. I’ll only get more of you
killed if I bring you further. Spread out here and hide, or hunt, whatever you
wish. This will be over within the hour,” I said.

“I
come with you,” said Gurt.

“You
can’t,” I said.

“I
come,” he said.

I
reached round and grabbed him by the throat. I lifted him off the floor and
looked at him, squares fleeing across my vision and error messages flashing up
all over the place.

“Where
I’m going you won’t be able to survive. Stay here and hold. Trust me.” With
that I dropped him and jumped into the drop shaft. He didn’t follow.

* * *

For
a thousand years many stations used rotation to simulate gravity. On other
stations people adapted and were adapted to live without gravity. There is a
whole race of humans in the Sol system who remain apart from Earth-normal
humans because a meeting could be fatal. These weightless adapted humans have
bones as brittle as egg-shell and severely atrophied muscles. When, as a result
of the accruing Unification Formulae, came methods of gravity and antigravity
generation, many stations received a radical overhaul. The Enmark station was
cylindrical and had once spun around its axis. Its floors had been arranged
concentrically having a simulated gravity of one and a half gees at the outside
and zero at the centre. With the advent of gravity generators, floors had been
put in across the cylinder, so in effect it had become a cylindrical tower.
Transport from top to bottom of the tower was by drop shafts. In these, irised
gravity fields squirted people in whatever direction they chose. With the
shafts shut down there was no gravity field, just weightlessness. I hit the
opposing wall of the shaft and, driving the tips of my metal fingers into a
ridge, flung myself upwards. I did this again and again until I was travelling
at about forty kilometres per hour. Over-spill of gravity generation from each
floor tugged at me slightly as I sped past, but did not slow me much. With my
weight came a lot of inertia. I turned as I hurtled upwards and readied myself.
I hit the top of the shaft about a minute later.

The
metal boomed under my feet and I left two foot-shaped dents in it. The rebound
had me floating down to the entrance to the top floor. Upside down in relation
to that floor, I looked through into the corridor beyond. Standing in the
centre of the corridor was a three-barrelled machine gun behind which sat a
woman dressed in blue coveralls and mirrored helmet. She must have been Enmark
rather than God soldier. She didn’t see me until I waved at her. I must have
gone past too fast.

“Jesu!”
she said and opened up with the gun. I suppose it must be disconcerting to
suddenly see an upside-down metal skull grinning at you from the end of the
corridor. I hauled myself out of the way until the firing ceased, then stuck my
head down again.

“Missed
me!” I shouted. I was feeling a bit flaky after all those ionic bolts. She
opened up again and I could hear her yelling into a communicator.

“Missed
again!”

She
ran out of ammunition on the fourth occasion. I stuck my head round, about a
hundred bullets smashed into the back wall of the shaft, then the gun kept
making its repeated treble clicks as she refused to take her hand off the
trigger. I dropped down through the door to the floor and she sat there behind
her gun pale-faced, waiting for me to come and kill her. I clicked one
eye-shutter down in a metallic wink, turned, squatted down, then launched
myself with my fingers speared, at the back wall of the shaft. The bullets had
done what I required of them. The metal gave and I punched a hole, which I then
tore wider to get me through. Beyond this I tore through thick insulation to a
second thinner skin of metal. I stabbed my hand through this, tore a rent, and
stepped through.