"You checking me out, huh cabro? You gonna trepar?"
"Uhm," the man gulped. "What?"
"Trepar. You gonna get on this?" She slapped the side of her hip.
"Oh, uhm. No, ma"am. Please step back, I"m closing the door now," he stammered.
She laughed harshly. This lower-grade minion of the local constabulary knew better than to mistreat her, even verbally.
"Too hot to handle, huh? Yeah, that"s what my last guy told me," Aldriena said. The deputy shifted uncomfortably again. She turned away from him and sat down on the bunk ap.r.o.n. The metal door slid shut, encasing her in the tiny vault.
Aldriena relaxed a notch.
That feels better. I"ve got issues. So sue me.
She knew she had a lot of anger in her. That didn"t bother her too much-it drove her. Now the security guard wouldn"t forget about her. When the UNSF inquired about her, they"d be sure it wasn"t a case of mistaken ident.i.ty. They had her DNA, but that kind of thing could be planted. The whole picture had to fit.
She looked around the tiny cell more carefully. A small viewing console in the wall reported to her civilian link and blocked out all other services. She had an hour of news-only, old style video access per day. No VR time. Aldriena wondered if some facilities had punishment VRs for prisoners. What would it be like? Standing around in a boring yard with nothing to do? Or would it actually be actively unpleasant somehow? Such a thing probably existed. It would be easier to keep the inmates under control if they were all linked into some virtual chain gang laying an endless railroad through an electron desert that never ended.
She turned the tiny viewer on to make it easier to notice when the power went out. It droned on about some strike in the United States that threatened the station"s luxury food items.
Then she saw a clip of her arrest. Aldriena smiled. She managed to look quite fetching even while being picked up off the floor by the artilheiros. The news story had actually gotten some of the locals stirred up, saying that an innocent woman had been detained by the s.p.a.ce force dogs for their own lewd entertainment. Someone out there had actually believed her accusation! She laughed aloud.
Aldriena realized it had been a long time since she"d laughed and meant it. She rolled over in the cot and waited. She considered letting the Cascavel try and get past the link inhibitor, but she decided now was the time to lay low. She didn"t want any attention when it came time to leave.
Aldriena waited. She thought of a faraway green land where her mother and her father had nurtured her and every day was a wonder. A place that had receded so far into memory that she now doubted if it had ever existed. She wondered if j.a.pan still looked the same despite the political and military changes that had occurred since the Chinese takeover.
Her tiny view screen went blank. The cell darkened, lit only by the emerald glow of a couple of battery-powered LEDs under her bunk. Aldriena carefully rolled off the bed guarding her head in the cramped quarters.
Her door unlatched. She opened it and leaned out.
It was just as dark outside the cell. She saw only a minute glow ahead. Her eyes struggled to discern its size and distance. Something large blocked the corridor. Her eyes were still adjusting; it was too large and motionless to be a person. She reached out to identify the object. Cold metal. It was a security robot. It obviously wasn"t functioning, but she couldn"t help but reach for C4B. She swore when it didn"t come to hand. The weapon was gone and she hadn"t gotten a replacement.
She snapped out of it. Who cared about the robot? As long as her companions had frozen it up, she didn"t have to deal with it. In the darkness, she stepped around its body and headed down the corridor, the direction from which she had arrived. She tried to envision the central area of the security annex and a route out of it.
She came to the main chamber. The emergency lights had been blocked from activation, but she saw the dim glow of a few LEDs in the room.
"This is bulls.h.i.t," she heard some voice say from a far cubicle. "Should we head out to the power station on foot and see if we can help?"
"It can"t be a global outage. I still see lights from the hub through the inner ports," another voice said.
Aldriena stepped lightly with one arm probing ahead, trying to move silently. She calmed her breathing. The doors should be straight ahead and to her left, she thought. It"d be a breeze to walk through here and get back to the Silvado.
A flash erupted in front of her accompanied by a bolt of pain. An odd sensation followed. Aldriena struggled to identify it. Then her back struck the floor and she realized it had been vertigo. Someone had clotheslined her in the dark.
She instinctively rolled to the side and got on all fours. She heard the sound of a boot stomping the floor where she"d been. She reached out with her hands until she felt a heel, and then wrapped her hands around it. She put her shoulder into the knee of her attacker and shoved.
"G.o.dd.a.m.n!"
She heard the curse and then a satisfying crunch followed by a clatter. She"d toppled whoever it was into something.
"What"s wrong? What"s going on over there?" a voice called out.
"Somebody"s a klutz," another voice offered.
Aldriena regained her feet and started to move. She realized she"d lost her direction but kept going anyway, hands outspread.
"Shut up! Someone else is in here!"
She thought she heard the sound of breathing from her right. The sound bubbled slightly. Of course. Blood. She"d bloodied him up, and now she could hear it interfering with his breathing. If she could ...
The emergency lights snapped on.
A man in a guard uniform stood directly before her, his arms spread wide like her own. A crimson mustache ran from his nose, dripping from the side of his chin. Aldriena jabbed him straight in his bloodied nose, putting her body behind it. The man fell back and covered his face with a muted cry. Aldriena dropped her hand and rolled her eyes. The artilheiros took anybody these days. The man appeared incapacitated from her strike.
She hopped over his legs and headed for the door of the security station. The lights flipped back out.
"Wait! Stop right there!" a voice called after her.
Stop. Right. I"ll be sure to stop and allow you to detain me, officer.
She smashed into a wall. Then she felt a manual door release bar and pushed it. A sliver of dim light appeared, and she pushed toward it until she slipped through the doors of the security annex.
The light came from the windows above, looking out over the central station hub. As the voice had mentioned, the lights on the hub still gleamed in the vacuum, adding to the starlight from outside the station. The ring of the station shielded the windows from the direct light of Sol. Aldriena took it in for a second, and then she ran down a corridor and turned right.
Once out of sight of the annex, she slowed and started to walk normally. Her link didn"t see many services. Apparently, her fellow Core members had done quite a number on the local systems. She accessed her cached maps of the station and requested the route back to the Silvado. A ghostly green line appeared before her to show the way.
Aldriena walked calmly down the corridor. She knew that messages were going out through several channels to the UNSF. A suspicious communique encrypted with a cipher known to be compromised would be intercepted. Any minute now, the port inspector would find a crate of mysterious plastic outfits that had been marked as foodstuffs. And of course, there was the escape of Aldriena Niachi right on the heels of her capture.
She strode along after the green line. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a couple of people talking. Their voices sounded worried. She didn"t slow to listen to their complaints.
Only a minute or two more and she would be back in the Silvado, ready to ship out on the empty hydrogen barge.
With any luck, the UNSF would scramble here and give Project Insidious more time. That was the plan, anyway. Aldriena frowned.
She wasn"t so sure she wanted the project to go on any longer.
Seven.
Bren came on alert as the UNSF fleet moved within range of the s.p.a.ce city of Tanelorn. He moved to the Guts to be closer to the machines and his team, even though he could have directed the incursion through his link from anywhere on the ship. He liked to be where he could smell the lubricant and feel the heat from the electronics. It made him feel closer to the action.
The UNSF manipulated deep s.p.a.ce radar buoys to remove the presence of its incoming fleet from the navigation data published on the net. Electronic warfare pods attenuated and scattered any detection mechanisms in place on Tanelorn, although such measures usually only allowed the fleet to get a little closer before being detected. Tanelorn would still have an hour or two to prepare for the a.s.sault.
Reiss-Marck Industries owned and operated Tanelorn. Bren knew from his briefing that Tanelorn manufactured building materials that crystallized perfectly in zero gravity. The station had an extensive wing that didn"t rotate with the inhabited part of the base, which contained a giant robotic fabrication plant.
On board Vigilant, Bren executed the launch checklist with his team of handlers. Twelve a.s.sAIL units were with Bren in the Guts-Napoleon, Nemain, Nemesis, Neptune, Nerad, Nergal, Nerthus, and Nga joined the Thermopylae survivors Maladomini, Marauder, Meridian, and Mournblade. Foremost on his mind was the spider-bot Red. If another such machine awaited them here, could they win again? Could there even be more than one on Tanelorn? The entire team had done everything they could to prepare for that possibility. The four surviving a.s.sAIL units from the first raid, bolstered by eight new acquisitions, gave them two more units than they"d put into Thermopylae. Also, they"d start the machines up earlier, before the cruiser touched the hull of the station.
As they ran down the checklists, Bren monitored the Vigilant"s progress toward the target. Bren half listened to the effort to attach to the hull through reports and radio traffic flickering by in his PV. His part of the mission started once the ship had latched onto the station and forced a breach. It sounded like they had only a few minutes left to wait.
Bren linked to his old favorite, Meridian, with nothing more than a casual thought. He realized that only the hardware remained the same (and not even all of that) between runs, but he liked to link into the cameras of the lead unit.
Bren saw Hoffman had already connected to Meridian more than an hour ago to complete the checklists. Hoffman had the experience Bren needed in a lead operator, and Hoffman oversaw Meridian, so it always. .h.i.t the breach first.
The Vigilant latched onto Tanelorn like a metal scavenger nestling against the sleek body of a synthetic shark. Bren felt the vibration of the contact through the metal decking of the Guts. The a.s.sAIL units didn"t move.
That"s a good start. At least they"ll let me give the word. They"re smart, but they don"t yet realize that they"re vastly smarter than I am.
"Okay team. Let"s. .h.i.t it."
The a.s.sAILs moved out, picking their way through the Guts. Bren glanced at the green UNSF emblems on the armored sides of his machines. His universe accelerated. He believed in their mission to bring the deep s.p.a.ce stations of the megacorporations under control of law. Without the UNSF, humans might go extinct. He wanted some order over the chaos. There had to be a balance between the world government and the corporations.
Once the clanking of the machines started to diminish, Bren centered Meridian"s forward cam in his PV.
He saw the breach point, a forced double airlock. Meridian"s cam view shuddered with the stride of the machine. He noticed batches of airscrub gra.s.s ahead with banks of storage lockers interspersed along the walls. Meridian charged past several of the lockers into a larger open area strengthened by ma.s.sive structural columns.
A flash of movement flickered across the cam. Something black. Bren heard a thump from the audio feed.
Oh, no...
"What was that?" Bren asked.
"A person ... several, actually. They"re on Meridian"s leg," Hoffman reported. He sent out a pointer to a side cam. Bren accessed it.
Bren saw people in the strange black suits clambering over Meridian like ants holding onto a giant beetle.
"Dammit. What"re they doing?" Bren watched a cam that focused on one of the suited figures. At first, the person seemed to cling to the a.s.sAIL leg with his arms and legs wrapped around it. Another person, also suited up, came into the camera view long enough for Bren to watch him swing a metal club into the camera lens bubble. It left a tiny scratch. A second later, he heard it again. Thwack.
"There are about a dozen of them in the atrium now," said the calm summary of a female handler. "They"re all engaging the a.s.sAILs."
Surely, they don"t hope to stop the a.s.sAILs? Unless one of them has a bomb.
"Progress is blocked," Meridian broadcast. "Cannot proceed without causing severe injury to one or more of the station inhabitants."
Of course, Bren thought. They couldn"t hurt the a.s.sAILs. They would just inhibit the machine"s maneuverability. The robots could not move freely for fear of harming the people. Which left the machines open to attack.
Bren switched between several cameras. The armored people cl.u.s.tered around a couple of the a.s.sAIL units holding onto the legs and one another.
"Colonel Henley, are you seeing this? The locals have all gone malcon on us. None of them look armed beyond a few pieces of furniture."
"Affirmative. My men will clean your a.s.sAILs."
The a.s.sAIL units overheard the conversation and seemed to accept the solution. Marines poured into the atrium pointing their weapons and yelling for surrender. A couple of the suited people charged the newcomers. One marine shot the leg of an attacker with a rubber bullet. The crack of the weapon stirred the entire group of black-clad inhabitants. They let go of the machines and turned on the marines.
The marines started to curse and hurl insults on their channel. They shot rubber bullets at the people in the suits. The heavy black gear seemed to protect those inside to some degree, but the slugthrowers still dropped them eventually. Once they"d taken several hits each, the attackers were incapacitated, rolling about on the floor clutching their limbs or heads in pain.
"f.u.c.kin" loony malcons!"
"Buckle-bulbs!"
Bren saw one of the inhabitants trying to get up on one knee, but a marine dropped him with a single smack across the helmet with his rifle stock.
"Glue "em up!" yelled a sergeant. "f.u.c.king glue them up now!"
The marines started to drop glue grenades onto the suited figures. Bren watched a marine toss a grenade onto a group of three struggling suited figures before dropping back. The grenade erupted like a high-speed film of an opening flower. Glue tentacles sprung out to stick onto everything nearby.
But the many-armed glob of glue rolled off and attached itself to the floor.
"What the f.u.c.k?" Henley said.
"They aren"t sticking, sir," said the voice of a sergeant on the scene.
Bren didn"t like that news either. If the glue didn"t stick, then the people would be that much harder for the marines to control. He remembered that the glue grenades had clung to the suits at Thermopylae.
"I expect a Red to show any second now," Bren transmitted. "We"ve got the station people and marines crammed in there, there"s no room to maneuver. If we have to engage another Red, there"s going to be injuries to the people in there."
"Get some more solvent and clean that machine up," the sergeant ordered.
"Belay that order," Henley transmitted. "The machines are strong enough to deal with the glue. They"re made to handle the security robots, remember? Get those malcons back into the holding tanks. Forward team, secure the bridgehead."
"Yessir! You heard him you s.p.a.ce dogs!" yelled the sergeant. Marines stepped toward the doorways and erected waist-high security icons to guard the entrances. Gleaming red beams from the crowns of the devices scanned the entrances searching for intruders.
"Lieutenant Hoffman. Why does he call his men s.p.a.ce dogs?" asked Meridian.
"It"s a nickname, Meridian," Hoffman said. "Not pertinent to the mission. Think about how you are going to complete the incursion with these people in the way."
"I am thinking about that Lieutenant. May I request additional clarifications simultaneously?"
Bren watched Hoffman push back a lock of sweaty hair. They exchanged glances. Bren nodded.
"Yes, you may, as long as it may affect the mission," Hoffman said.
"What"s a buckle-bulb?"
"A crazy or desperate person."
"Why hasn"t the a.s.sAIL team been supplied with these nicknames and terms in our mission data?" Meridian asked.
"They"re not relevant to the mission," Hoffman said.
The answer was true enough, Bren thought. But somewhat deceptive. The real reason had more to do with hiding human flaws from superintelligent machines.
"If we get attacked by other robots while those malcons are all over my machines, people are going to die," Bren said. "We can"t go in here without the weapons free. The a.s.sAILs have to be able to maneuver."