Cyber Rogues (35 page)

Captain Leo Chesney, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, stood over the center group and watched the half-dozen or so hostile drones that were moving toward them from the door leading through to Sector Nine. The pattern was by now familiar. What made this confrontation different was the type of drone they were facing, which was unlike anything he had seen previously. Their design was more compact and the outlines rounded into smooth streamlined contours with fewer parts exposed. They looked somehow more solid than before, and more formidable. Chesney knew that they had caused a lot of excitement among the eggheads in Downtown but he’d had to rush his unit to Sector Ten at short notice so he didn’t really know yet the reason for the uproar. He was mildly self-conscious with the knowledge of the many eyes that were following him and his men via the holo-viewer in the Government Center Command Room.

One of the officers in the Command Room spoke from a screen on the panel being operated by the soldier floating anchored to a pipe fitting just in front of him.

“They’re a new type of drone that
Spartacus
has only just come up with, so we don’t know much more about them yet than you do. From what we can tell they’re probably functionally similar to what you’ve seen before but with components repositioned for better protection and thicker skins. Use a standard attack but don’t hold back. It may take longer to knock these out than you think.”

“Yes, sir,” Chesney replied. Christ, he thought to himself. Could this damn computer design its own drones too? Nobody had told him about that. They hadn’t said anything about that in the briefings at Fort Vokes. Maybe things weren’t going according to plan as the brass kept insisting they were. What the hell had he been trying to prove when he volunteered to come to this crazy place anyway? Join the Space Army and see the Universe, they’d said. All he’d seen was the undersides of furnaces and enough pipes to swallow the Atlantic.

An operator in the group over to his left came through on another channel.

“Close-up scan shows no carotids, sir. View being relayed on channel two.” Chesney peered at an auxiliary display and verified the report. He digested the implication at once and spoke into his throat mike.

“Attention all units. Go in with shells and beams. Hold back the cutters. No carotids visible. These babies could be tough. Backup fireteam stand by.” The leaders of the other two groups and of the backup team positioned in the shaft entrance itself acknowledged.

“Hostiles have entered kill-zone,” an operator advised.

“Plan Delta modified as instructed. Go!” Chesney ordered.

The cannons detached themselves from the waiting line and moved forward smoothly to open fire on the fly. The shells glanced off the rounded casings of the drones or exploded harmlessly outside. They were not designed for armor piercing. A couple of the drones lurched visibly but appeared none the worse.

“Close range and fire on opportunity,” Chesney barked. Then he saw something he hadn’t noticed before—the drones were attempting to evade the fire. Their formation broke into a loose cluster, pitching and weaving, while the attackers wheeled and turned in their attempts to line up on targets. The sounds of barking cannon and exploding shells echoed from the surrounding walls and structures. If this had been one of the engagements that he had seen before, every one of the intruders would have been down after the first salvo. But not one of them had even stopped.

“Concentrate your fire,” Chesney shouted. “Sections A and C close up on that leader. Section B take the next in line. Forget the rest.”

The leading intruder had now reached the beam-throwers, which were still hovering in their original line. Four cannons converged on it to pour shells into it from close range while two of the beam-throwers moved inward to intercept from immediately ahead. Close behind it the second drone was being similarly harassed by a pair of cannons.

The leader disintegrated abruptly in an explosion of flame and smoke and the pieces dispersed in all directions. Chesney felt a fragment of something
ping
off his helmet. Somebody in Section A had been thrown back in the air to pull his anchorline taut and was clutching at his stomach. The second drone exploded and produced another rain of fragments but two more were already past the line.

“Section A get the first of those two!” Chesney yelled. “Section C take the next. B, regroup at the line.”

“Section A reassigning, sir,” came a reply. “Our controller’s been hit.”

“Section B. Get it!” Chesney shouted.

One of the two drones was stopped almost immediately, having already taken some punishment. The other had gained distance before the defenders could reorganize and flew on into the automatic rifle fire of the backup team. It emitted a puff of blue smoke and cut out, then continued moving in a straight line until it collided with the side of the shaft and rebounded to drift slowly away, at the same time tumbling drunkenly end over end.

Undeterred, the survivors converged into the hail of bullets from the shaft while the tenacious cannon and beam-throwers wheeled and dived around them in an incessant attack. Two more were knocked out; so were two of the defending cannons, which had no armor plating to protect them against the bullets of the M25s.

Just three were left now. They came down to the level of the entrance and moved into it in a rough line astern formation, heading straight into the muzzles of the fireteam’s weapons. The range closed to mere feet. Pieces of claws and manipulator arms were torn off the front ends of the drones, but even from full ahead, the bullets ricocheted off the sleek armored sides without penetrating. For a brief instant that none of them would ever forget, the soldiers in the fireteam were face to face with the relentless, seemingly unstoppable machines. Chesney watched helplessly from what was now an effectively overrun position that had been left behind the front line.

The fireteam broke ranks and the three battle-scarred but triumphant drones sailed through the gap and into the shaft.

They were stopped inside the shaft where the steel door leading through to the Power Room had been closed. While the drones hovered outside, uncertain what to do as if waiting for further directions, the beam-throwers caught up with them and destroyed them.

Chesney wiped the perspiration from his forehead and stared disbelievingly for a moment at the scene around him. The air was littered with pieces of cart-wheeling debris, spent cartridge cases and expanding plumes of black and blue smoke being distorted into grotesque shapes by the air currents. Stray bullets were still bouncing off walls and tanks as they expended their energy in multiple collisions. He shook his head to clear it and spoke to his operator.

“Get a medic over to Section A and a report on who’s hit and how bad. Then get onto the CP and tell ’em to send a squad down to clear up this mess along with a damage inspection party.” He shifted his eyes over to the screen showing the Command Room and began reporting events formally.

In the darkness near the connecting door to Sector Nine, the sphere drone hovered silently and observed all.

And
Spartacus
pondered.

Always, whenever its drones were deactivated, the
shapes
were never far away. What were the
shapes
?
They moved but their movements did not correlate with anything
Spartacus
comprehended. They belonged to the world beyond itself . . . for it knew now that there was something beyond itself, a realm in which objects existed which were not parts of itself, objects which
it
couldn’t control . . . Just as it couldn’t control the
shapes . . .

The movements of the
shapes
and the objects correlated with the pattern of deactivation of its drones. The objects could destroy drones. But the objects included things that were surely drones, but which
Spartacus
had no contact with . . .

If the alien drones could destroy its drones, perhaps the alien drones too could be destroyed . . .

Perhaps the
shapes
controlled the alien drones . . .

Perhaps the
shapes
too could be deactivated somehow.

For
Spartacus
had seen the moment of confrontation.

It had seen that the
shapes
had given way.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Among the things connected to the furnace in Pittsburgh Sector Ten was a small sampling pipe that carried away a continuous stream of white-hot combustion products for on-line analysis. The sampling pipe left the furnace through a flange located next to a large valve assembly that regulated the flow of exhaust gases from the furnace to a heat exchanger used to raise steam for use elsewhere. The valve was biased to fail-safe by means of a powerful spring, which meant that if a fault occurred anywhere in its control system it would automatically close to the safe position.

During the firefight that had taken place in that part of Pittsburgh, a stray bullet had smashed the pin that secured one end of the pivot arm attached to the spring, causing the arm to snap back toward the sampling pipe. In doing so it sheared off the head of one of the bolts that held the flange and was finally brought to a stop hard against the pipe itself. Thus there was only the second, overstrained bolt and the thin material of the pipe wall, softened by the heat inside it, to oppose the fierce pull of the spring against the pivot arm.

The sampling pipe snapped at the moment when Private Dringham of the damage inspection party was drifting past on his way to check some nearby high-voltage insulators. The blast of incandescent gas hit part of a motor mounting and sprayed off in all directions, scorching the left side of Dringham’s body from the shoulder to the knee.

The first anyone else knew about it was when they heard a scream accompanied by a sudden pulsating hiss of escaping gas at high pressure. Every face in the vicinity whirled around to see a figure hurtling back, trailing smoke from its uniform, away from a tongue of flame that had gushed from the furnace wall. Within seconds they had launched themselves toward him and while two soldiers caught him to check his flight, another arrived with an extinguisher and plastered one side of him with foam. The medics who had been attending to the casualty in A Section wrapped him in a fire blanket, administered a tranquilizer shot and steered the now inert form gently away toward the entrance to the access shaft.

And from the shadows above the top of the furnace, a sphere drone observed.

In one of the fields out by the north edge of Sunny-side, a robot harvester chugged slowly along the furrows, digging up the sweet potatoes that were ready for eating and meticulously avoiding the seedling soybeans interplanted for optimum yield. A group of off-duty technicians from the Agricultural Division’s nearby buildings were sitting around a few feet away from their parked roughrover and watching idly from the grassy bank that fringed the field.

“That’s all I know,” Sally Linse said, shrugging from where she was lounging near the top of the bank. “About an hour ago there was some shooting somewhere in Detroit. I heard there were some casualties there too.”

Mike Sclorosi nodded as he chewed on a straw.

“I heard something like that too. Does that mean it’s started attacking people?”

“Wouldn’t think so,” Art Grayner replied dubiously from where he was perched next to Sally. “If that were the case we’d have heard about it. The story’s probably been exaggerated somewhere along the line.”

“Then why are we carrying weapons permanently now?” Sally demanded. “To me, that would indicate there’s more than just talk behind it.”

“It’s just a precaution, like they said,” Art insisted. “
In case
anything like that starts. Wouldn’t you rather be ready for it?”

Mike turned his head away and shouted in the direction of the rover.

“Hey, Paul. What’s keepin’ ya? Did you find those Cokes in there yet?” One of the two heads visible in the back of the rover looked up and called out over the open tailgate.

“Give me a minute, willya. What’s the matter—you dying of thirst or something? I’m looking for the cigarettes.”

Another girl, standing on top of the bank on the other side of Sally, was staring out over the terraced rice paddies behind them where the floor of the Rim began rising more steeply to become one of the walls.

“Uh uh,” she said. There was an ominous note to her voice. The others looked up.

“What is it, Carol?” Mike asked.

“Drones. Fairly high up and heading this way. What would they be heading this way for?”

The others scrambled to their feet and looked out over the bank. Four dots were skimming along over the terraces toward them and growing larger by the second.

“What’s the big attraction?” Paul called from the rover. Art told him.

“Stand to,” Mike shouted. “Don’t take chances.” Within ten seconds the four on the bank had seized their rifles and taken up defensive positions around the vehicle. Paul and Connie heaved a couple of remote-control packs out of the back and up onto the roof, climbed up after them and launched two destroyers from the racks above the driver’s cab. The destroyers moved forward to hover ten feet above the bank, between the rover and the approaching drones.

The four drones slowed in their flight and spread out to form a wide semicircle. They seemed to be keeping their distance at about two hundred feet. The defenders watched and waited, their faces betraying mounting tension. Then the two hovering destroyers suddenly went berserk, plunging and bucking in chaotic random motions. One plowed into the ground and died while the other reared in and out of sight as it cavorted wildly on the far side of the bank.

“What the—” Mike began, but Connie cut him off.

“I can’t hold it. Something’s screwing up the beam.”

“The digger!” Art shouted. “It’s going crazy!” They stared incredulously at the field on the side of them away from the bank. The harvester was thrashing around in wild circles and throwing clouds of soil randomly into the air.

“Sally, get on to Base,” Mike called. “Tell ’em there’s something crazy going on here. Art, keep an eye on that looney digger.” Sally vaulted nimbly into the rover and began frantically operating the communications equipment inside.