Event Horizon (Hellgate) (5 page)

Vaurien was with him. “Cannon fodder, Neil,” he warned.

“Distraction,” Marin said pointedly. “Right now, we’ll take anything we can get.”

“You got your drones.” Vaurien paused. “I’m configuring them to seize anything that moves and put it in storage. They’re going to be fragged as fast as the Zunshu can target them.”

“But six Zunshu machines,” Vidal added, “can’t fire on a hundred targets at the same time. It’ll buy you an advantage, Neil – a
small
one.” He took a breath, audible over the comm. “Drones coming at you … my vidfeed is about six meters up on the wave guides above you. You’ll see them in a moment.”

In fact, Travers had already seen them – and so had the automata.

It was so odd to see unarmored, unsuited figures striding across the hull of the
Wastrel
with the aid of tractor technology so similar to the Arago patents. These machines were careless of the vacuum, the background radiation from the engines, the constant brain-sizzling pulses from the active sensors. The six automata had the body and face morphology of the ancestral Resalq; at first glance they looked like the Kulich siblings, clad in plain blue-gray coveralls and black work boots which would not have drawn a glance on any colonial street; but the similarities between these figures and any generation of living Resalq were barely skin deep. They were
hardware
, with a single objective.

As airlock 9 sealed, Etienne broadcast the standard warning issued to crew working on the hull. Travers was never more keenly aware of being disconnected, and he shifted his grip on the plasma torch as Marin began to move. The automata were still thirty meters away and all six had spun to engage the swarm of maintenance drones which had descended on them with outstretched handling arms. The directive was
seize and store
, and the drones had no more regard for their own safety than the automata.

“They’re Zunshu generation four,” Marin muttered. “Firearms built right into the armature, see?
Go
!”

The hundred incoming drones would be knocked down in seconds, but Travers told himself those seconds should be all the advantage he and Marin needed. They were moving as the automata began to fire, and he had set his apparent mass low enough to cover the distance in two giant strides. Curtis was less than a half pace behind him, and the bolt gun pounded like a jackhammer, firing white-hot, thumb-thick, twenty-centimeter rivets with a force like a mortar. Travers’s instruments registered every concussion as he watched four of the automata physically picked up and flung away by the impacts.

The last two moved with a speed so far in advance of even a champion athlete among humans, Travers was breathless. One instant they were aiming into the swarm of drones, picking them off at the rate of four, five per second; the next they were
gone
.

“Neil,” Vidal called sharply.

“Get a track on them,” Travers barked as Marin came to a slithering halt on Aragos, and the plasma torch spat a blue-white jet as long as his forearm.

Three of the four automata had gone down hard in a tangle of threshing limbs, while the fourth had been flung off the deck and was drifting away from the
Wastrel
. The three on the deck were easy pickings, but the forth could be dangerous, and Travers watched as it writhed in mid-flight, twisting until it could bring its weapons to bear.

“Neil!” It was Jazinsky calling now.

He did not need her or Vidal to tell him he had just been lidar painted. Neither the plasma torch nor the bolt gun had the reach to hit the Zunshu machine, and at its rate of drift, it would be five seconds, minimum, before the automaton entered the firing arc of any gun the
Wastrel
possessed. The ship’s defenses had never been configured to repel boarders on the hull.

“Zunshulite,” Marin whispered across the comm as Travers dove into the fracas in the shadow of the dish arrays, where the wounded automata were halfway back to their feet.

The snake-tongue of blue-white plasma licked out, haloing one machine from pelvis to breastbone with the brutal heat of a cutting torch. He wondered if this had ever been done before – Mark Sherratt would know – but if an assault rifle could punch through the abdominal armor, reach the core processor and destroy it, a plasma torch
should
do the same.

It was a gamble Travers was willing to take, but his teeth were clenched as the Zunshulite shielding his own belly and chest was pounded by a weight of gunfire that would certainly have fragmented standard Marines armor.

The jet from the plasma torch was slower than hitting the automata with a dozen rounds from an AR-19, but the final result was more satisfying. For two seconds, three, the Zunshu mechanism defied the heat and then it seemed something in the abdominal cavity melted down, ruptured in a gush of molten metal. The machine spasmed, limbs flailing before it went limp. Travers dove on to the next, all the while weathering a barrage on the armor.

He was on the second Zunshu before it could get away from him, but the third had slithered loose. “I’m going to lose it,” he warned between gritted teeth as he slammed the muzzle of the torch into the belly and hit the trigger.

“I’ve got it.” Curtis had launched himself.

He vaulted over Travers as the Zunshu thing thrashed, trying to dislodge him and angle its weapons. Travers keyed his Aragos high, pinning the machine down, holding it against the deck while the torch heated his own armor to such levels, the suit’s rudimentary AI issued a piercing warning.

He ignored the alarm and watched as Marin shot low overhead. A projectile from the bolt gun slammed the Zunshu back against the housing of the dish’s drive motor and pinned it there securely. It was still writhing, trying to force its way free, when Travers picked himself up and walked into the path the cannon mounted in its left arm.

He was aware of Marin standing between him and the drifting Zunshu, taking the hammering from its cannon on his own Zunshulite breastplate, but Travers was intent on the pinned automaton. His armor was so hot, peripheral systems had dropped offline and the cooling system was overloading. He seemed to be locked in an oven and sweat streamed from him as he walked into the Zunshu gunfire, but in the cold of space the suit was shedding heat rapidly. As the temperature fell, the cooling system began to function properly and chill fresh air wicked sweat and heat away from his face.

The drifter was sixty meters away now and its weapons had fallen dormant as it exhausted its ammunition. Vidal’s voice cut across the loop. “I’ve target-locked the bastard. Duck!”

The same chain guns that protected Hangar 4 opened up with a sun-bright torrent of 50mm, armor-piercing, incendiary and tracer. The Zunshu machine wrenched itself apart in a welter of shrapnel and gasses. The remains of its body were flung away by the impacts, and Travers began to breathe again.

The automaton was distant enough that his instruments registered nothing when its self-destruct triggered at last, but Jazinsky called, “It’s gone. Nasty implosive device … two more out there, Neil, Curtis. They can hurt us, even if they don’t get inside.”

“Understatement,” Marin said glibly. “Mick, you still tracking them?”

And Vidal: “About two hundred meters aft of your position, heading for the service locks ahead of the engine deck. Jesus, if they get in there –”

“They won’t.” Richard Vaurien hesitated a moment. “Tully, take us to Weimann ignition minus one second, and hold. Neil, Curtis, what do you need?”

They were already moving and Travers said, breathing hard as the sweat began to cool on his skin, “Can’t think of a damn’ thing. Don’t delay for us, Richard. If you see the wire coming up, you bloody do it!”

Had a Weimann jump ever been performed, with crew exposed on the hull? The radiation storm would have fried Marines armor, and Travers was far from convinced a thin skin of Zunshulite would protect them. He looked sidelong at Marin, seeing only the shape of the suit, featureless, black, not quite sleek, not quite cumbersome.

“This,” he muttered,
sotto voce
, “is going to be the stupidest bloody way to buy the ranch anybody ever thought of.”

If Marin heard him, he made no response. They were moving fast on the blind side of the crane gantry, and Vidal’s voice murmured in Travers’s ears, giving him the position of the Zunshu while in the loop’s busy background he heard the tumult from Oberon.

At last, Ramesh’s people had grasped the gravity of the situation. Perhaps the appearance of a squad of Marines was enough to jerk them out of civilian complacency, or the clamor of their own AI, which was endlessly repeating the warning of intruders on the platform and an imminent hull breach.

Bravo Company had placed itself between the science crew and the service bays where the Zunshu shells had locked on, and Etienne reported heat blooms where the automata were cutting through. Blastdoors were slamming, sealing, across the breadth of Oberon, and the voices of Fargo, Inosanto and Kravitz shouted over the infuriating calm of the AI. A moment later Travers heard Fargo bawl,

“
They’re inside
! Twelve units. We’re decompressing … the AI’s got it covered. Inosanto, move your ass!”

There was a maddening desire, a terrible need to be there on Oberon with Bravo, as if he must call the shots, and Travers knew it was no more than a knee-jerk. Bravo had done this twice before; they were more qualified than any force in the Deep Sky to challenge a company of automata, and as he caught a glimpse of movement among the girders and rails he forcibly dragged his mind back to the hull of the
Wastrel
.

“Got the buggers in sight, Mick.” He took a breath, licked his lips. “Retask the drones – if the swarm decoy worked before, it’ll work again.”

“You got it,” Vidal assured him. “We’ve deployed a gang of hangar drones on the inside of the service locks. If the Zunshu do get through, they’re going to walk right into a bunch of cutting torches. What worries me is –”

“The self-destruct,” Marin finished. “This is the way the Resalq used to go down. You fight the bastards to a standstill, and if they can’t get to your generators …” He rasped a Resalq curse and took a half step ahead of Travers. “Standby, Neil.”

“Do it.” Travers was already configuring the torch as his eyes raced over his suit’s systems data. Several peripherals were still intermittent but Aragos, life support and comm looked good, and when he could see the target with his own eyes, these were all he cared about.

The two automata were already inspecting the service airlock, and the engine deck itself was only thirty meters away. Vaurien’s tone was level, dark. “Close your blastdoors, Tully. Give me a Weimann status report.”

Ingersol’s own voice was sharp and Travers remembered, Tully had never been this close to a combat situation. His entire five year Fleet hitch was spent working with the engines of the tender
Livingstone
, and he had already contracted with Richard before his formal notification of civilian status arrived. As a tender, the
Livingstone
had never seen so much as a skirmish, and the
Wastrel
had always been one of the safest ships in the Deep Sky. For the first time Tully Ingersol was under the gun, and it was clear he did not relish it. “Blastdoors are sealed, Rick. Weimanns are at 97%, all three reactors are available, and we’re holding at ignition minus one second. Jesus bloody Christ, Neil and Curtis are out there!”

“I know, Tully.” Vaurien’s voice was familiar, intimate, and a light year distant in Travers’s ears. “Neil?”

“Standby,” Travers told him.

Marin was only waiting for the drone swarm, and as they descended like so many hornets around the Zunshu, he moved with a speed and agility that surprised even Travers. His apparent mass was low, and he dove across the distance separating the crane from the service lock. He was upside down, corkscrewing in mid-flight as he emptied the bolt gun into both of the automata, less than a second apart.

He was tight on target, crippling both of them with shots into the abdominal cavities, and now Travers held his breath. The core processors were housed there, and it was possible he might have knocked them offline with the impact, as surely as he could have done it with a high energy pulse from an assault rifle. But Travers was not about to take the risk. He launched himself after Marin while the automata were still pitching backwards with the force of the impacts.