Creations (35 page)

“I’ve tied them down as tight as I can,” Harris said once they were back on board. “They’re not going to fall off. The weight will slow us down though.”

Safi leant over from the back seat and looked at the rover’s control console. “Harris, are you using the manual traction controls?” she said. “You’ll get more speed out of it if you do.”

“No,” he said. “It’s all automatic on the bigger rovers. I don’t drive these open tops much.”

“Mind if I take over then?” she said, climbing off and moving round to the front.

“Sure, if you want to.”

“Can you drive these things, Safi?” Max asked her as she swapped places with Harris.

“Drive them?” she said with a gleam in her eye, “I used to race them.”

Then she set off, throwing dust out from beneath the tyres as she put the settlement behind them.

As soon as they were underway, Ariel extended the long whip antenna that would let him transmit to the main base and tried to reach Jack Rogan. He used a private channel, talking for at least five minutes before switching back to the common channel and telling the others what he’d found out.

“They know something’s up,” he said. “Earthrise control have registered that site five’s service line is down but they haven’t made contact with them yet.”

“What about Jack?” Harris said. “Can he come for us?”

“He can, but he’s had a hard time getting a lander. I had to tell him everything that’s happened here. He’s going to meet us at Anchorville though, in two hours’ time.”

“Let’s go then!” Safi said, putting on another burst of speed.

They drove on, heading east under Safi’s far from leisurely driving. She was enjoying every minute, taking the hills and rises at almost full throttle, and every time they cleared the crests Max would feel his stomach rising up inside him as the feeling of weightlessness returned. The impacts that ended each jump were violent as well, causing him to clamp his jaws together to avoid damaging his teeth. All he could do was hold on tight and trust her driving.

“Safi, remember we’re carrying explosives here,” he called at one point.

“Insensitive munitions,” she said. “They’re drop-tested to worse than what I’m giving them. Stop worrying, Max!” Then she laughed, in spite of the danger they were in, and opened up the throttle even more.

The shortest route east took them back into the original operating area of the colonies, though as the boundary itself now seemed to be meaningless, they didn’t see any advantages in going the long way round. Max watched the moving map display over Safi’s shoulder as they went, and matched it up in his mind with the places he’d seen other colonies being attacked. This was their point of closest approach to the Kambria colony and if the trouble had spread south, then this was where they were most likely to meet it.

He was just about to tell Safi to keep her eyes out when suddenly she slammed on the brakes, sending the rover into a weaving, four-wheel skid across the dirt as she tried to keep it facing forward. “Come on, damn it!” was all they heard from her as she struggled with the controls, losing speed the whole time. When eventually they did come to a halt, they were facing almost sideways and were covered from head to foot in dirt and dust that their wheels had sent flying. Max cleared his visor and checked everyone was okay, then looked into the east to see what had made her stop so quickly. What he saw next made his jaw
drop.

A few hundred yards ahead of them was another machine, hard at work destroying yet another colony. The colony was small, obviously a new one, with only its central block and a few half-built smaller structures surrounding it, but otherwise no different to the ones they’d already seen. The machine however was unlike anything they’d seen before.

Two streams of thought, running simultaneously, went through Max’s mind when he saw the thing standing there. On the one hand, the scientist in him tried to rationalise the way it looked, to work out the reasons for its appearance based on what he knew about how these machines were built and how their designs could adapt. On that level at least it made sense. He could see how using legs rather than wheels would give the best speed in this low gravity environment, and he could see how having four of them arching out of its body like spider legs would give the best compromise between speed and stability. He could see how turning the cutting tools into a pair of agile front limbs made the job of dismantling other colonies and machines more efficient, and he could also see how grouping all the vision systems and receivers into a single unit at the top of its body would help it sense its surroundings. However, even as he looked at it, and saw how its component parts and characteristics helped it to do the job it had to do, the other part of his brain still couldn’t quite shake the thought that this was some kind of enormous mechanical monster, almost arachnid in its shape and appearance.

This was what Kambria had created. In the day or so since the discovery of the broken-down rover had signalled that human artefacts gave a better yield than lunar dirt, and the in the few hours since the attack on the ESOS rover had shown that speed as well as strength were needed to bring in the harvest, this was what that two-mile wide factory had decided to build and send out. The simulated evolution codes that could cover a thousand
generations in a matter of hours, the problem solving algorithms directing and steering the process with frightening precision: this was the design they had produced. To see the response appear so quickly was chilling.

“Do you think it can see us?” Damon said.

“I don’t know,” Ariel said. “But if it looks this way then it will do.”

“I don’t want to move too fast,” Safi said. “Let’s get out of here slowly, then go round.”

She started to back up gently. There was a boulder field to the south, and if anywhere was going to give them cover then that was it.

They’d moved about thirty feet when a light on their communication panel lit up, showing that the rover’s transmitter had suddenly become active. It was probably updating its navigational fix, or carrying out some other purely automatic function, but it was obviously enough for the machine’s sensors to detect. It turned its head to face them, looked at them for no more than two seconds, then backed away from the section of the colony it had been working on and started to walk toward them.

“Oh shit,” Harris said, as the machine began to move.

At first Max thought they would be okay as the machine slowly came closer. Maybe it wasn’t as fast as it looked, maybe those long jointed legs were there for a reason other than speed; it almost looked as if all they had to do was drive fast and they’d be okay. Then the machine began to accelerate, changing its slow ungainly walk into a series of long, leisurely jumps, first off one leg then off another, seemingly in no hurry at all but covering tens of feet with each bound. Max reckoned its top speed must have been double its current pace if not more.

“Right, we’re going,” Safi said, turning off to the side and speeding away from it. Max looked back over his shoulder to see what it would do next. As he had feared, it soon showed it had more reserves of speed available as it increased the length and
the pace of its strides, spending whole seconds off the ground between each one. They were heading out into the open now, almost back the way they’d come, and Max didn’t see any chance of getting away from the thing if it managed to close the gap further.

“Safi! Take us back to the colony! That boulder field will slow it down!”

She understood what he meant straight away and took them in a wide curve back toward their original heading. Max looked behind them again to see how close the machine had got. It was less than a hundred feet away now and was closing rapidly, its four legs stretching outward to keep its body and sensors balanced between each leap. He’d seen identical behaviour in running robots that he’d helped to design, giving a computer nothing more than the laws of physics and a design job to complete and seeing what solution it found. The fact that those designs were currently being vindicated by the performance of their pursuer was hardly much comfort.

When the rover began to slow down Max turned around in alarm, initially thinking they had run out of power or broken down. Then he saw the large rocks passing by on either side as Safi took them in amongst the boulders. Some of them were over twenty feet in height, craggy and pockmarked by millions of years of micrometeorite impacts. As soon as they had rounded the first one, the machine was lost from view behind them. She still kept the pace up though, driving first left then right, losing them among the scattered rocks and outcrops.

“We can’t hide from it in here you know,” Harris said as they made their way deeper into the rock field. “It can still follow us through the gaps.”

“True, but it can’t go quickly,” Max said. “This will buy us time.”

“As long we don’t run into a dead end,” Safi said. “This may have been a mistake.”

The boulder field did almost look like a maze now they were inside it. Their tyres could handle rocks up to a foot in height, but the impassable ones formed definite channels and pathways. Safi seemed to be driving almost at random but the map display on the rover console gave enough information to retrace their steps. Ariel, however, seemed to think they would be better off without it.

“We should turn the navigator off,” he said. “It’s got us into enough trouble already. If that thing out there can detect our transmissions, it will only give us away.”

Whatever radio reception capability the first machines had been designed with, whether for boundary sensing or communicating with their colonies, those designed after the rover attack had clearly adapted them for hunting.

“What about our suit transmitters?” Max said.

“Those too. Plug yourselves into the rover, we’ll talk along the wires.”

They each hooked themselves up to the rover’s communication loop, then turned off their personal radios. Once their communications were safe, Ariel was the next to speak.

“I think we should lay a trap for our new friend there. If it homes in on transmissions then that’s what we should give it. With a little surprise of our own thrown in.”

No one had to ask what he meant. Only the details needed to be agreed.

“Can we do without the emergency beacons on our suits?” Damon said. “If we take them off they’ll make good decoys.”

“We’ll only need one,” Ariel said. “We’ll use mine. Harris, were any of those charges on remote detonators?”

“No, they’re on timers, all of them.”

“This could be tricky then. Get me one out, let’s see what we can do.”

They were still moving round inside the boulder field, heading roughly eastward the whole time. By now, however,
they’d slowed down enough for Harris to reach back over to the boxes they’d brought and pull out one of the cylindrical blasting charges. It was the same length as a drinks can but twice as wide, with thick, foil-coated insulation round the outside. The timing device and detonator were contained in another, much thinner cylinder which slid into the main charge down its centreline. Ariel assembled the two components, then took the small emergency beacon off the chest pack of his suit and tied the whole thing together into a ready-made booby trap. Vac-tape and bungee cord seemed to be the main constituents, part of the ubiquitous rammel carried by all space-based professionals.

“It’s done,” he said. “Let’s see how it likes this.”

“We should get out into the open again,” Max said. “If we use it in here we won’t know how long that machine will take to find it. We need to time it right.”

“We’ll go back to that colony then. Take it out at the same time. We plant this thing, rig the timer to give us one minute, then we get back here and hide.”

Safi took them north again, this time without the aid of the navigation display. As they emerged from between two of the larger rocks they saw the colony not far away, with just a quarter of a mile of ground in between. The machine was no longer in sight.

“It’s still here,” Ariel said. “I can feel it. I don’t know if it followed us in though. Let’s move.”

Safi took them back over to the colony, accelerating back to almost full speed. Every second they had over the machine was valuable, and she knew without being told that there was little time to waste.

It was only when they got within fifty feet of the colony that they realised the mistake they had made. The machine was there, as it had been all along, having returned to the easier pickings of the colony rather than chase them through the rocks. Only the bulk of the structure’s central block had hidden it from their view.

Safi’s reactions seemed to be the fastest of the five of them. Before the others even had time to speak she’d turned the wheel, hard over to the right, away from the colony and toward the outlying fringes of the boulder field. All they could do was grip onto the handholds, struggling to stay in their seats as she turned into the corner at almost full speed.

Time seemed to slow down for Max as the rover took the turn. At first he thought they were going to make it as the low-slung suspension flexed and twisted to keep all four wheels on the ground. He even had time to wonder what they were going to do next, whether they would go back among the boulders, or out into the open to risk another high-speed chase. They were about halfway through the turn however, with the vehicle skidding at almost ninety degrees, when he realised that something altogether different was about to happen. Rocks, more like loose rubble but some larger ones too, were now passing under the chassis of the rover. Oh my God, he thought, if we hit one of those we’re going to go over. And then it happened.

The rock hit the front left hand tyre almost side-on, slamming it to the side and wrenching the steering wheel out of Safi’s hands. She grabbed it back, fighting for control as the left wheel ploughed into the soil and the right hand side of the rover started to lift. From that point on there was no hope of recovery. All Max could see was the horizon gracefully rotating as the vehicle rolled onto its side and the blur of rocks and boulders came up to meet them. Then the protective bars enclosing the top of the rover hit the ground, kicking up a flurry of soil and stones, and suddenly the full violence of the impact could be felt. Five, six times they rolled, each collision hitting them like hammer blows as the safety cage began to collapse under the strain. They were on proper boulders now, big ones, capable of causing real damage whether the cage was there or not and for one instant, Max was sure they weren’t going to get out alive. He closed his eyes and waited for it to end.