The Collapsium (42 page)

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you recommend some hand weapons to our fax machine, please?”

“Certainly.” From his folding couch, Shiao rattled off a series of model numbers, technical specifications, magazine
sizes and battery capacities, piezoelectric coefficients and physical dimensions. Beside him, the fax hummed and glowed.

“Acknowledged, sir,”
Sabadell-Andorra
replied a few moments later. “Weapons are ready.”

With shaking hands, Muddy snapped his couch harness in place. “Right. Well, everyone should pick one up on the way out. I don’t suppose we have sufficient mass in the reservoir to make s-spacesuits?”

“Only two complete ones,” the ship replied apologetically. “We are low on certain key elements, notably oxygen.”

“We could send two of us ahead in full armor,” Cheng Shiao suggested. “I will, naturally, volunteer.”

It took Bruno a moment to realize the suggestion was aimed solely at him. He
was
the commander of this expedition, in every conceivable sense. Such a decision
was
clearly his. He considered it. Would dividing their forces leave them vulnerable? Would the ship be safer with people aboard to guard her? Did it matter, two people, or four, or six? He wanted no more deaths on his conscience, but wasn’t at all sure how to accomplish this under the circumstances.

He did know, in a low, cold-blooded way, that Shiao was the one person here—other than himself—that he’d be most willing to sacrifice, if such sacrifice could not be helped. Shiao was the person most willing to sacrifice
himself
, and also the one most qualified—far more qualified than Bruno—to break into the fortress of a mad genius.

The sun moved out of the bow window, which turned clear again, showing stars and a few wispy tendrils of solar corona. Their little ship could be anywhere, really; looking up there gave no impression that they were about to land on a planet.

“All right,” Bruno said finally, “Shiao and I will don space suits and attempt to seize control of Marlon’s study, wherever it may be. I’m not sure whether we can reverse the damage he’s done, but if so that will be the likeliest place from which to accomplish it. The rest of you stay with the ship.”

“I object,” Vivian said immediately, from her little couch
beside Shiao’s own. “I
am
a Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary.”

“Also a sixteen-year-old girl,” Bruno and Shiao said together.

“I didn’t have any heroics in mind, thank you,” she said, with a cool stiffness that belied her age. “I’m thinking of Declarant Sykes’ household control systems. There must be an interface somewhere, and if I can find it I may be able to issue law-enforcement overrides to the resident intelligence. If not, I may at least be able to sabotage it in some way.”

Bruno thought about this. In no way did he wish to further endanger Vivian’s life. There was danger enough, without sending her off to the mercies of armed robots and other household security systems.

“None of us have backup patterns we can rely on,” he reminded her. “Our actions here carry the sting of permanence. If you die, you’ll
die
.”

“I’m aware of that, Declarant.”

“Hmm. Yes. Well, I leave it up to Shiao. He seems quite protective of you.”

“I—” Shiao began, but was immediately interrupted.

“I order you to agree,” Vivian said.

Shiao reddened; his protective instincts were suddenly frustrated, bottled in. He didn’t like that one bit.

“Cheng,” she warned, her copper eyes flashing angrily, “this won’t look good on my report. Physically, I’m sure you could prevent me, but you
do not
want to refuse a direct order. Nor would you want, in any way, to endanger this mission. Would you like to be the cause of our failure?”

“I … would not,” he said, with visible effort.

“I’ll take every precaution,” she said, softening. “I have no desire to upset you.”

He slumped back into his couch. “I’ll agree, Commandant-Inspector, on the sole condition that you not go alone.”

“I’ll go with her,” Deliah said. “I’ve dealt with some balky intelligences in my time.”

Hugo, strapped right where it had been for the past several
days, started up an urgent mewling. “Me! Me! Me!” it seemed almost to be saying.

“Steady, old thing,” Bruno said in his best tone of reassurance.

“Thirty seconds to touchdown,” the ship informed them.

Muddy, eyes on his sensors, worried at the hypercomputer interfaces with badly shaking hands. “We appear to be d-directly over the central complex, with several access ports nearby. The habitable area consists of four main chambers plus assorted closets and conduits, eighteen meters below ground. Optimal landing site … identified.”

Suddenly, the space above them was alive with brief, intense, moon-sized flashes of light. They were taking fire again.

“He’s detected us,” Shiao said unnecessarily.

“Centroid of detonations is eighty kilometers above us,” said Muddy. “We’re close to the source—he may not be physically able to aim any lower than that. Ship, probability of a hit?”

“Twenty percent, each second.”

“Time to touchdown?”

“Three seconds. Two. One. Zero.”

The deck thumped beneath them, gently. Paradoxically, the sense of gravity lessened immediately, as if they’d been parked and stationary all along, and now the ground had dropped out from under them. Above, the view still gave no impression of a planetary environment; on Mercury, outer space started a millimeter above the soil. And the blasts of the zero-point field inversion weapon started eighty kilometers above that!

“He won’t hit us on the ground,” Deliah said hopefully. “He might hurt his own equipment.”

“It looks like taking off again will be a bit of trouble, though,” Tusité observed quietly. Her eyes had begun to take on a kind of refugee stare, an unwillingness to be further surprised or intimidated.

Bruno was out of his harness and up within four seconds
of touchdown; Shiao was even faster. At the hatchway, the familiar sizzling sounds had begun as
Sabadell-Andorra
melted its way into one of Muddy’s promised ‘access ports.’

“Time to penetration?” Muddy called out anxiously.

“Ninety-two seconds,” the ship replied.

“Spacesuits,” Shiao said. “Quickly.” He picked up a bundle from beside the fax machine, tossed it to Bruno, then picked up another bundle for himself. Bruno struggled into the garment as best he could, and the suit itself did its best to help him. Still, he’d only worn one of these things once before in his life, and at that time he’d had palace servants to help him into it. It took him well over a minute to get dressed. Shiao—finished in a quarter the time—passed out weapons and then, for nearly a full thirty seconds, tapped a ringing, armorclad toe on the deck.

“All right,” Bruno said when he was finally ready.

Hugo, to his astonishment, stood up alongside him. Had the battered old robot somehow struggled free of its restraining straps? They lay on the floor, neatly piled a meter away from the iron rings they’d been strung through. Good Lord, had Hugo actually
unfastened
all the hasps, with his clumsy golden fingers? It seemed inconceivable.

“Mewl,” the blank metal face said, with what sounded for all the worlds like satisfaction.

Bother it, there was no time for this. “You stay here, Hugo. Guard the ship, with Muddy.”

“Pick a weapon, sir,” Cheng Shiao suggested urgently, pointing at a pile of clutter beside the fax. “His defenses may still be coming on-line. For everyone’s safety, we should be moving along as quickly as possible.”

“Hmm. Indeed,” Bruno said, peering down at the weapons pile through the clear dome of his space helmet. Should he select one of the pistols? The rifle? The vibrating impervium sword? At the very bottom of the pile was a simple wellstone rod, a meter and a half in length and as big around as a stairway banister. Bruno reached for it, pulled it up from the clutter, felt the heft of it in his hand. It was very light, like a toy
made of foam. But it was wellstone; currently it emulated a black polymer surface, but it could become almost anything in his hands. Less a weapon than a humble
tool
, like an oversized hammer, but he took it nonetheless.

Shiao saw this, and nodded. He himself had taken up a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, and waited now by the door with grim impatience.

The sizzling noises stopped.

“Safe to open hatch,”
Sabadell-Andorra
said.

“I’m scared,” Tusité said, as if unable to help herself.

“We’ll b-be scared together,” Muddy reassured her, in a voice at least as shaky. He threw a trembling arm around her.

Meanwhile, Shiao threw the latches and pulled the door open. On the other side was a simple pressure vessel, a metal cylinder with a door of its own facing off to one side. In that door was a little circular window of some heavily tinted, glassine material, through which a gray-white moonscape was visible. There were two more cylinders nearby outside, their hulls reflecting mirror-bright in the harsh sunlight, and beyond them were some other, smaller glittery things less easily identified.

And farther away still, where the ground started rising up into low, rounded hills, Bruno saw the inky blackness of superabsorbers. Solar energy conversion, nearly 100% efficient. He thought of his own little sun, imprisoned in converters and finally murdered outright, and he winced inwardly. Marlon had thought things through much better than Bruno ever had; he would not want for energy in this place.

The floor of the cylinder opened into a spiral staircase leading down into darkness.

“Come,” Shiao said without delay, leaping for the staircase and beckoning Bruno to follow. The gravity was light here—probably no more than half a gee. Shiao seemed to glide down the stairs like a man-shaped balloon, his feet only occasionally touching down. In moments, the shadows had swallowed him whole. Gulping, Bruno started after him, probably with a good deal less grace.

Had Bruno been a claustrophobic or acrophobic sort, these stairs would be a nightmare—each one just barely wide enough for his foot, the spiral itself just barely wide enough for his suited body, and without any sort of banister. As the first turn completed, the stairs above him closed over in a tight, low ceiling that was barely high enough to accommodate his helmet dome. His suit headlamps switched on; they were the only source of illumination, although far below it seemed he could see the dull reflections of Shiao’s lights. He clanked downward, metal toes on metal stairs, for what seemed like a long time: four turns, five, six …

Finally, at the eighth turn of the spiral, the stairs opened out into a chamber that Shiao’s headlamps—and now Bruno’s own—showed to be roughly the size of a di-clad worker’s platform. Ahead, the chamber was lined wall to wall with glossy black robots. They were short, long armed, long fingered. Some of them carried glossy black pistols of strange design; others were empty handed, but reached out those empty hands and made popping, blue-white electrical arcs across the spaces between them. There were twenty of the robots lined up across the room, and in fact, Bruno saw that in places they were two rows deep, and behind them all was a fax machine that, every few seconds, glowed and hummed and spat out a new comrade to join them. Rarely had Bruno—or anyone, really—seen a sight so menacing.

“Freeze! Royal Constabulary!” Shiao said in quick but officious tones. “This facility is a suspected crime scene. All autronic and telerobotic mechanical entities are ordered to shut down forthwith.”

Ignoring him, the robots, moving as a single entity, took a giant, clanking step forward.

That was all the encouragement Shiao needed—he raised his sword and pistol, uttered an uncharacteristically wild exclamation, and leaped directly at them. Pistols coughed—not only Shiao’s own but those of the robots as well. Shiao staggered. Bruno himself was knocked back by a series of impacts across his chest and arms. Bullets exploded in yellow-white
pops, snapping miniature shrapnel into walls and floor and ceiling.

Shiao cried out again, not in pain but in a sort of battle mania. In one motion he straightened his body, aimed, and fired his pistol point-blank into the skull of the nearest robot. The robot, alas, neither staggered nor fell.

Breathing hard, too hard, Bruno realized he himself was essentially unhurt—these space suits were tough, bulletproof. His helmet dome was slightly chipped in two places, and the white outer fabric of the suit itself was discolored here and there. Unfortunately, the gleaming hulls of the robot guards appeared to be tougher still.

Undaunted, Shiao hefted his sword against the same attacker. That worked much better—the impervium blade, vibrating so rapidly its edges were a fog, sliced through the robot’s neck, decapitating it cleanly. But still the robot did not fall; still it reached for Shiao with long, bright-sparking hands. A dozen robots pressed around Shiao, clawing silently, mere moments from zapping him or crushing him or lifting him off the floor and doing Heaven knows what. Another six of the things were advancing on Bruno—
clank, clank, clank
. And he realized he had never—not once in his life—struck a blow in anger. He had never learned how.

The situation was, in a word, desperate.

But there
was
a rod of wellstone in Bruno’s hands, gripped tightly, held out before him at chest level, and with a few whispered commands he caused its surface—in the middle and on the ends, well away from his hands—to seethe with all manner of exotic fields and substances, all manner of EM radiation and software pathogens and electrochemical reactions. He had no idea what these enemies were made of, which of the thousands of improbably durable materials had been woven together to form these gleaming hulls, but he figured surely
something
would hurt them. Ditto their sensory and computational systems—no matter how rugged the design, in the end they had to be made of something, controlled by something,
vulnerable to something
in the wellstone’s vast library.