Sean Dalton - Operation StarHawks 03 - Beyond the Void (5 page)

 

Holborn scuttled along the corridors, veering and stumbling and chuckling softly to himself. This was his chance, his one perfect chance. He would show them, his great, indifferent masters, that he wasn’t just a servile worm to be used and then discarded.

He found his former laboratory more by instinct than by any conscious seeking. The lights came on. He looked around, seeing nothing changed, nothing touched. His breath sobbed in his chest. He wiped the perspiration from his face with unsteady hands. Tears of joy ran down his cheeks. Now, now, now was the time to do it, the perfect time, while Maon was occupied with defeating Kelly’s attack.

Holborn laughed, rubbing his hands. He staggered to the vault. It took him three tries to unlock it. He kept forgetting the sequence, and his hands were unsteady. But at last the massive door slid open with a faint hiss of released air. A cold, stale odor rolled out over him. Breathing deeply of it, Holborn drew himself fully erect and entered.

He opened one of four chests and from the ice inside withdrew a tiny vial of amber liquid. Death, here in his hand. Safe enough at this temperature, but let it warm to a mere 4 degrees Celsius ...

His fingers curled around it, thawing it against the warmth of his own flesh.

Chuckling, he left the vault standing wide open and made his way to the forbidden part of the City. It might take him a couple of entire work cycles to walk there, but that did not matter.

 

Overcome the pain, these grooves of pain, these firebrands of agony.

Overcome the oneness. Break it. Make the. oneness two halves.

Separate. Apart. Independent.

Two. We are two. I am ...

No! Oneness!

 

Kelly and Siggerson almost reached central control when they rounded a bend in the corridor and came face-to-face with a motionless phalanx of twenty-seven warbots standing three across and nine deep.

Kelly’s gut did a flopover, and Siggerson let out a small, strangled sound. But Kelly didn’t hesitate.

“Open fire,â€

 

It didn’t happen.

One moment he was falling. The next instant he hit solid metal, flat on his back, with a jarring impact that made him think he’d broken in half.

He lay there stunned in total darkness, with all the wind knocked from him.

Siggerson snapped on a torch and came running. “Ouoji did it! She did it! Kelly, you idiot, I thought you were done for. Some people have all the luck. I can’t believe her precise timing.â€

 

After some long hours of reprogramming by Phila and Siggerson, the robots worked for them. Records showed that the City had not moved from her current position for at least half a century, perhaps more. The question remained now: could she be moved at all?

Kelly settled himself at his station in central control. Seats had been rigged up for them; robots didn’t need seats. These were not comfortable. The controls were spaced at the wrong intervals. There were many that were marked off limits simply because Siggerson could not figure out what they were for.

Siggerson had argued that they should try to rewire the attack ships docked in the hangar area beside the ruined Alliance ships. But they were totally robot ships, not designed for living pilots at all. It just wasn’t practical to use them, but Kelly was bringing them along for scientists to study. This whole massive ship would jump Alliance technology ahead by years.

If
they could move her.
If
they could navigate her.
If
they could make the proper interdimensional jump to get them home.

Siggerson had lost weight. But he seemed completely absorbed in his work and showed less and less strain from his experiences. As for Phila, there were dark circles beneath her eyes and she was unusually subdued. But Kelly knew she was still dwelling on her actions in the genetics lab. He had tried to talk to her, but she evaded the subject. Kelly worried. He’d gone through this himself, over and over, and he’d seen plenty of his fellow officers go through it. In time she would work through it on her own and come to grips with it, or it would fester and ruin her.

Flashes of binary came in over myriad communications lines as robots and automatic functions reported in. Kelly couldn’t translate fast enough. He stopped trying. At this point the bots could report what they wanted; the City was moving, ready or not.

A beep sounded, startling him from his reverie. He flipped a toggle to open a voice line.

“Beaulieu to control.â€

TK scanned and proofed. (v1.0) (html) Nov 2011.