And then, all at once, the two men were right there at the fax orifice, a simple frame of wellstone surrounding a fog-shrouded vertical plate. Shiao looked at Bruno, who tapped the rim of the thing with his varicolored staff. That was all it took—the fax machine groaned, expelled a cubic meter of white plastic beads, and promptly expired in a mess of oil and smoke.
After that, it was simply a cleanup operation. Bruno ran to a beleaguered Hugo, kicking toy soldiers off him one by one. Hugo had fallen to his knees, and one of his arms had come off and was dangling by a single wire. But there weren’t that many toy soldiers, now that their supply was finite. The tide had clearly turned against them. A few tried to leap onto Bruno’s left arm, apparently aiming for the environmental controls there, and a few others tried—somewhat pathetically—to retreat toward the protection of the remaining longarms. Bruno finished them all off, though, while Shiao hacked the long-arms apart with his sword. The last enemy they killed together, Shiao lopping the head off and Bruno going after the body, reducing it with one blow to a pile of steaming shards, like a dropped soup bowl.
Then the two men fell against each other, weeping and laughing with relief.
“I thought I was doomed!” Shiao expanded, spreading his arms wide. “Well fought, sir! Well fought! What on Earth did you do to those poor bastards?”
“Dropped a library on them,” Bruno panted, and laughed at his own joke. He turned to Hugo. “You came at just the right time, old thing. And fought well! You’re smarter than I credit, aren’t you?”
Hugo, more battered than ever, said nothing, but stared at the arm dangling from its scarred, scorched shoulder.
“We’ll fix you,” Bruno promised. “You’ve done your part. More than your part. Are you able to make it back to the ship?”
Hugo seemed to consider for a moment, before slowly shaking its head. The neck joints squeaked alarmingly. Indeed, Hugo did look much the worse for wear, unlikely to rise at all, much less climb eight turns of stairs. Presently, it fell from its knees to its metal buttocks, landing with a dull clank.
“Er,” Bruno said, “damn, will you survive at all?”
Hugo considered that as well, and finally—squeakily— nodded. With its remaining hand, it gestured for Bruno and Shiao to go on without it.
“Very well, friend,“ Bruno said, still fighting his surprise. “God willing, we’ll return for you shortly.”
Then he marched toward the far wall—which was featureless—and said, “Door.”
Not surprisingly, nothing happened—Marlon’s stronghold was programmed to kill invaders, not to obey them. But Shiao, in a move no doubt routine among the Royal Constabulary, took up the impervium sword again, knocked twice on the wall as politely as you please, then carved a perfect rectangular door of his own.
“I shall lead this time,” Bruno said, stepping forward.
But Shiao, whose body blocked the new doorway, turned and gave him a hard look. “No, sir, you shall not. You, at least, must reach Sykes’ study alive.” Then he was stepping through, into another darkened chamber.
He screamed almost at once. Bruno hurried through to see what was the matter.
On the other side was a chamber much like the one they’d just left, with another fax machine in precisely the same place. There were no robots this time, for which Bruno was grateful, but instead a viscid, blue-green substance, seemingly halfway between a slimy fluid and a vapor, floated from the rectangular orifice. Indeed, the room was full of it already, tendrils lapping around at knee level, like ground fog.
“What is it?” Bruno demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“This substance is corrosive!” Shiao warned at once, backing away, forcing Bruno back through the doorway again. “It’s eating through the armor of my boots!”
“Is it?” Bruno asked, alarmed. He bent to look. Indeed, Shiao’s boots—in none too good a shape to begin with—were bubbling and smoking at their surface, as the blue-green substance ate its way in. Curiously, though, where any reasonable chemical corrosion would have slowed down as it progressed, as its reagents were slowly consumed in the reaction, this one seemed to be holding steady, chewing its way through the armor with an almost mechanical efficiency.
Almost mechanical, indeed.
“That’s a disassembler fog,” Bruno said. “Nonreplicating, by the look of it. Hold still, please! It’s a spatially discontinuous cellular automaton, each microscopic unit technically independent, but owing to power and mass distribution issues it’s effective only in clusters of a milliliter or more. Actually, I think I’ve seen this exact strain before! I think this is the stuff the Tongans used to use in the garbage dumps at Ha’atafu!”
“Can you neutralize it?” Shiao asked, with quite remarkable calm.
“I expect so,” Bruno agreed. “It really is more of a tool than a weapon. Quite tractable, generally.” Whispering to the well-stone rod, he caused its surface, on one end, to form a layer of Bondril, a substance far stickier than natural atoms could ever produce. Then he touched this end to Shiao’s left boot, and rolled it up and down. The tiny disassembler automata were plucked up by the trillions of trillions, until finally there were none left on the boot at all. Or at least, not enough to get any organized activity together. With the rod’s other end, Bruno repeated the procedure on Shiao’s right boot, until it was clear as well.
“Now they’re simply eating your staff,” Shiao complained, though he did sound relieved.
Bruno couldn’t shrug inside his spacesuit, but he did say “Piffle.” The disassemblers were disassembling his staff, dropping out a fine silicon dust beneath them, but a few more whispered commands caused the affected areas to sizzle with pulsed electrical currents at frequencies designed specifically to kill disassemblers. In moments, the bubbling and smoldering had ceased. Then he simply commanded the wellstone’s outermost layer to slough off, leaving him with a good-as-new staff only slightly thinner than the one he’d started with.
“What would the Queendom do without you?” Shiao wanted to know.
Bruno declined to comment, saying simply, “We still have the fog in the room to contend with. Come.”
“Will your library trick work this time?” Shiao pressed, again blocking Bruno’s passage through the doorway.
“Let’s find out,” Bruno said, and nudged him through.
Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any more fog in the room than there had been when they stepped out. A quick look at the fax revealed that it was off, not functioning any longer.
“Perhaps Vivian has had some success,” Shiao said hopefully.
“Indeed. Or else the fog has simply attacked the fax that produced it. An inelegant design, if so. If you’ll excuse me, please?”
“Mmm.” Reluctantly, Shiao stepped aside to let Bruno have access to the edge of the blue-green fog bank. The staff was returned to blitter mode and dipped lightly into the fog.
The result was instantaneous: the fog—really just a suspension of electromagnetic fields generated by the individual disassemblers—vanished at once, and in its place a much sparser cloud of gray-white dust settled harmlessly to the floor.
“Very good,” Shiao said approvingly. “Very good indeed. We’ve only one or two more rooms to get through, eh?”
“Mmm. Time will tell, my friend. It doesn’t pay to underestimate Marlon Sykes.”
Again, Shiao cut a hole through the far wall. Again, he preceded Bruno through it. Again, he screamed.
“What now?” Bruno asked, hurrying through behind him. “Oh. Oh. My goodness.”