The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (42 page)

Suss heard a woman crying from somewhere. It occurred to Suss, not for the first time, that the helmet-creature was not very good at overseeing humans. These people knew they were under attack, but they did not seem to have been prepared for it, or know who was attacking them, or why.

She spotted something else. Knots of people were clustered around terminals set into the rock wall of the corridor, and others were pausing to check personal terminals. No one seemed to be getting instruction by asking a human superior—only by checking with a terminal.

People were taking their orders from the computers.
According to Spencer, the security people had been doing the same thing in the StarMetal building the night of their break-in. The guards hadn’t been happy about it then, and the workers here didn’t seem happy about it now. No doubt the official story here was the same as it had been then: that management was swamped and forced to let management AIDS handle routing administrative work.

Suss looked over the chaotic crowd What would they think, she wondered, if they knew the computer terminals were passing along the orders of an alien machine/creature, a nightmare thing that had sucked their company chairman’s mind away?

Suss launched herself into the confused throng, not with any specific goal yet in mind, but just to get a feel for the situation, overhear a few conversations, get the lay of the land. Judging by their hair styles, accents, and skill in zero-G maneuvering, Suss concluded that the vast majority of these people were from the asteroid belt, hired up rather abruptly from the labor pool on Mittelstadt and for high wages. No one seemed to have been here more than a month or so. Simply by looking at the state of work around her, Suss could tell that the job here was unfinished. The helmet-creature had set out to make its home asteroid into a formidable naval base—but the Pact Navy had arrived just a bit too early.

Rumors and speculation were everywhere. Some of the workers seemed to think they were building a new Pact naval base. A competing rumor, much closer to the truth, had it that one of the conglomerates—possibly, but not necessarily, StarMetal—was planning to rebel against the Pact.

No doubt, Suss thought, the latter idea had gained credence back when a fleet of robot freighters arrived at the base and the asteroid staff set to work arming them—and got a real shot in the arm when a destroyer popped into being right in their laps.

Suss made her way down a side alley and had to get out of the way of a squad of gleaming robots hurrying in the other direction. She had seen a lot of them already. That was another strange thing: there were entirely too many humanoid robots on the asteroid.

In the normal order of things, human-shaped robots were freaks, oddities. They were too expensive to build, needlessly complex. Except in rare cases, building a robot to look like a human made as much sense as building a shovel shaped like a gopher, or a lawnmower that looked like a flock of sheep.

The human anatomy is a general-purpose system, capable of many things, but not optimized for any one task. Most robots, on the other hand, were
specialized
machines, designed for only one or two jobs.

AIDs were certainly robots, highly advanced ones, but they weren’t shaped like
people. They couldn’t have done their jobs as well if they were.

There was an ancient style of portable tool called a swizarm knife that contained all manner of gadgets: a tiny pair of scissors, two or three types of cutting blades, tweezers, a magnifying glass, a tiny pair of pliers. Suss had found one in the comm shack tool cabinet and grabbed it. She was glad to have it in her pocket: even if she had to drop her tool kit and run for it, she could use the swizarm by itself to do any number of jobs.

Of course, for every job the swizarm could muddle you through on, there was a better, more highly specialized device that could do that
one
job better. But soldiers and spies liked swizarms because it was easier to carry one tool instead of fifty and muddle through.

To an engineer,
humans
were swizarms. You used them instead of robots for jobs where it wasn’t worthwhile to design and build the automated system—the robot—that could do the job better.

But suppose, Suss thought, there weren’t going to
be
any humans around anymore? You’d need
machines
to do all the once-in-a-while jobs, machines that could operate consoles designed for human controllers, read the indicators and handle the switches and dials and pedals and levers meant for a human controller. And the helmet had
lots
of human robots here.

Conclusion: The helmet didn’t plan to keep most of its human servants around any longer than necessary. It was a grim conclusion to jump to, but it felt right to Suss.

Suss stopped and checked a map set into the wall of the tunnel. By now she had her bearings and was working her way toward what was labeled as the central control room. Comparing the wall map to her memory of Santu’s conjectural diagram, she was certain it was the same compartment where the crew of the
Dancing Bear
had found the helmet those few short months ago. The control room now—what had it been a million years before? Was there something special about that compartment that made the helmet choose it for its power center once again? Maybe so. Almost certainly it was a place from which the shields could be controlled, and beyond doubt it was a place she could do some damage.

Suss noted down the path to take and got moving, avoiding a scruffy-looking work-robot as it passed her headed the other way. Down this way, along that corridor, this left, that right, closer and closer to her goal. She moved downward and inward, moving with and then against traffic as the mobs of humans and robots hurried on urgent errands. More of the tunnels started looking
alien
somehow. They were laid out strangely, in a way no human would have done it.

Something’s wrong,
she suddenly told herself. Her subconscious had spotted something. Suss glanced around herself, trying not to act suspicious, trying to think. Then it came to her. The closer she got to the control room, the fewer
humans
and the more
robots
she was seeing—and it was becoming increasingly clear that the robots were taking an undue interest in her. She thought back through her last few turnings—yes, there had been inconspicuous cameras at the intersections, and at least one or two of them had turned to track her—

A siren began to sound, and a nearby viewscreen suddenly switched on, showing two still views of Suss—frames apparently taken from a robot’s vision system a few intersections back.
Apprehend Intruder
the screen instructed.

Dammit!
Suss thought. She should have
known,
she told herself. Maybe she had been in no danger from the
humans
in this rock, but the bloody robots had to be under direct parasite control. And the parasites
had
to be good at data processing. At least it had happened at a moment when she chanced to be alone in the corridor.

Her hands were working before she was aware that she had even come up with a plan. She wadded up a blob of general-purpose plastic explosive and slapped it on the roof of the T-intersection behind her. She snapped the divider in a chemical-decay timer, poked it in the explosive, and started moving again toward the central control room, no effort at caution anymore. She scrambled down the corridor, swinging at full tilt from one handhold to the next.

The blast came up behind her, a deafening roar more felt than heard. The shock wave threw her down the corridor, slapping her up against the next turn in the passage. Half-stunned, her ears ringing, she peeled herself off the wall, trying to shake off the numbing blow. The air was full of choking smoke and dust and rock fragments caromed lazily back and forth in zero G. At least the way was closed behind her.

She dug into her toolbag again and pulled out the spool of filament charge. She anchored one end of it on the floor of the corridor and began spooling it out behind her. Shove a detonator into any point in the charge, and the whole long strip of explosive would go up at once. It was great stuff for sealing a corridor.

She made her way down the corridor, noted a small passageway heading up to the next level, and paid out more filament charge on the main corridor. She anchored it down at that end, then returned to the small side passage. She dug into the tools she had grabbed, found a small powerpack and a length of wire.

That was enough. Thirty seconds later she had a crude detonator rigged. It was nothing but two wires plugged into the filament charge, with Suss ready to touch the far ends of the wires to the powerpack. But it was enough. She scrambled back into the side passage and waited.

Company was not long in coming. A whole squad of robots barreled out of the main passageway, heading from the direction of the command center. She gave them just long enough to space out along the main corridor then touched off the strip of explosive, ducking out of the way as best she could.

WHAM! With a thundering crash that nearly rattled the teeth out of her head, the main passage dissolved in a torrent of noise, dust, and flying rock.

Suss crept cautiously out of her hidey-hole and hurriedly picked through the churning cloud of rubble and dust. In any sort of gravity field, the ruined rock would have slumped over and lay still. Not here. The corridor was filled with broken bits of wall and robot. Suss searched the broken machines for weaponry and was rewarded with a brace of heavy repulsors.

She pressed on, the light of battle in her eyes, with no thought for anything but getting to that damn control room and shutting down that shield. Then maybe she could lie down, rest, do something about the dull throbbing pain in her head, the trickle of blood coming out of her left ear from a punctured eardrum, pull the splinter of rock from her left shin. There was a constant ringing in her head, and her vision was a bit dim.

No such trivialities bothered her. She stumbled forward, using her left hand and right leg, the toolbag over her shoulder and one of her newly won repulsors in her left hand. She passed through the length of wrecked corridor and kept moving. Another pair of robots appeared and she blasted them with recklessly long bursts of repulsor beads. She scrambled forward past their wrecked bodies.

After a time, which might have been a minute and might have been an hour, it dimly began to dawn on her that something strange had happened to the corridor walls. She didn’t much care, but some corner of her pain-clouded mind warned her that it might be important.

She stopped and examined the walls—and realized that she had been proceeding down something very different than ordinary humanmade rock tunnels or even ordinary
alien
tunnels for a while. These walls were slick and smooth, an impenetrable grey in color. There was something sheer, and shimmering, almost
alive
about them. Half-seen images seemed to flicker beneath their surface. This was nothing humanmade, and nothing like what the crew of the
Dancing Bear
had reported.

If the walls had been like this, Destin would have filmed it, reported it. The walls had been dead then. Not like this, not alive.

Alive,
Suss thought.
This was here when Destin arrived but not yet alive, awake.
She realized at last that this must be part of the ancient central complex of the asteroid, a piece of corridor older than humanity.
Imagine waiting that long in the dark for someone to come,
Suss thought, almost feeling sorry for the helmet.

Had it been an honest servant once, bred or manufactured to serve as an immensely powerful AID? How long had it waited to be found? And didn’t folklore say that AIDs could go mad, lust for vengeance if ignored for too long? How long had the helmet brooded in the lonely, abandoned darkness? The idea frightened her far more than a squad of attacking robots had managed to.

Close. She had to be close. Trailing tiny drops of blood that hung gleaming-red in the air behind her, she pressed on, struggling to concentrate, desperate to keep the map of the asteroid’s interior clear in her clouded mind.

She stumbled around one last corner and surprised a pair of guard robots standing before a massive blast door. She shot them to confetti and dove back in behind the corner before they could react.
Must have been old models,
she thought.
I
could never outdraw a modern job.
It took her a moment to think, realize what it was they must have been guarding—but only a split second to snap back into the corridor and blast out the entry controls even as the massive vaultlike doors were beginning to swing shut. The blast door stopped moving halfway through its path and Suss kicked her way over to get behind it.

She looked around, shook her head to clear it and tried to think. The door,
that
was of human design, but it was as much a stranger here as she was, jammed into those weirdly glimmering grey walls. The corridor it sat in and the compartment behind it were utterly alien, with bits and pieces of human technology stuck in place here and there. Strange devices, in shapes that were hard to see, hung from the bulkheads. She shut her eyes and tried to picture the plan of the asteroid in her mind. There was no doubt about it: that was the main control room on the other side of the half-open blast door.

She dug a small wad of plastic explosive out of the toolbag, shoved a ten-second detonator in it, and pushed down the initiator button. She counted seven seconds before heaving herself up over the edge of the blast door and throwing the explosive inside.

A repulsor spat at her from the control room as she pulled herself back down. Hypervelocity beads hit the walls and disintegrated, flaying Suss’ back as ricocheting dust.

FLAM! The blob of explosive went off. Suss had calculated the charge to be enough to injure or stun anyone in the compartment without wrecking the place.

Moving as fast as she could, she swung up around the blast door and dove into the control room.

There was no one there. Then who the hell had fired? Suss looked to the far end of the compartment and saw the sealed hatch. She remembered from her briefings how fast the helmet had been able to move Jameson from his office.