“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-di-rectly 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,” Tusite 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, armor-clad 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,” Tusite 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, glass-ine 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 su-perabsorbers. 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.