Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines

“We’re changing course!” he howled. “Forty-seven point eight, full speed ahead!”

The order really applied to a cosmic vessel, but the driver understood it all the same; the plates and every joint of the transporter gave a shudder as the machine wheeled around practically in place and surged forward. Pirx got up off his seat, its tossing was pulling his head away from the eyepiece. Another flash—this time red-violet, a fan-shaped burst of flame. But the source of those flashes or explosions lay beyond the field of vision, hidden by the ridge they were climbing.

“Attention everyone!” said Pirx. “Prepare your individual lasers! Dr. McCork, please go to the hatch. When I give the word or in case of a hit, you’ll open it! Driver! Decrease velocity!…”

The elevation up which the machine clambered rose from the desert like the shank of some moon monster, half-sunken in debris; the rock in fact resembled, by its smoothness, a polished skeleton or giant skull; Pirx ordered the driver to go to the top. The treads began to chatter, like steel over glass. “Hold it!” yelled Pirx, and the transporter, coming to a sudden halt, dipped nosedown towards the rock, swayed, the stabilizers groaning with the strain, and stopped.

Pirx looked into a shallow basin enclosed on two sides by radially spreading, tapered embankments of old magma flows; two-thirds of the wide depression lay in glaring sun, a third was covered by a shroud of absolute black. On that velvet darkness there shone, like a weird jewel, fading ruby-red, the ripped-open skeleton of a vehicle. Only the driver saw it besides Pirx, for the armor flaps of the windows had been lowered. Pirx, to tell the truth, didn’t know what to do. “A transporter,” he thought. “Where is the front of it? Coming from the south? Probably from the construction group, then. But who got it, the Setaur? And I’m standing here in full view, like an idiot—we have to conceal ourselves. But where are all the other transporters? Theirs and mine?”

“I have something!” shouted the radiotelegraph man. He connected his receiver to the inside circuit, so that everyone could hear the signals in their helmets.

“Aximo-portable talus! A wall with encystation—repetition from the headland unnecessary—the access at an azimuth of—multicrystalline metamorphism…” the voice filled Pirx’s earphones, delivering the words clearly, in a monotone, with no intonation whatever.

“It’s him!” he yelled. “The Setaur! Hello, radio! Get a fix on that, quickly! We need a fix! For God’s sake! While it’s still sending!” He roared till he was deafened by his own shouts amplified in the closed space of the helmet; not waiting for the telegraph operator to snap out of it, he leaped, head bent, to the top of the turret, seized the double handgrip of the heavy laser and began turning it along with the turret, his eyes already at the sighter. Meanwhile inside his helmet that low, almost sorrowful, steady voice droned on:

“Heavily bihedrous achromatism viscosity—undecorticated segments without repeated anticlinal interpolations”—and the senseless gabble seemed to weaken.

“Where’s that fix, damn it?!!”

Pirx, keeping his eyes glued to the sighter, heard a faint clatter—McCork had run up front, shoved aside the operator, there was a sound of scuffling…

Suddenly in his earphones he heard the calm voice of the cyberneticist:

“Azimuth 39.9 … 40.0 … 40.1 … 40.2…”

“It’s moving!” Pirx realized. The turret had to be turned by crank; he nearly dislocated his arm, he cranked so hard. The numbers moved at a creep. The red line passed the forty mark.

Suddenly the voice of the Setaur rose to a drawn-out screech and broke off. At that same moment Pirx pressed the trigger and half a kilometer down, right at the line between light and shadow, a rock spouted fire brighter than the sun.

Through the thick gloves it was next to impossible to hold the handgrip steady. The blinding flame bored into the darkness at the bottom of the basin, a few dozen meters from the dimly glowing wreck, it stopped and—in a spray of jagged embers—cut a line sideways, twice raising columns of sparks. Something yammered in the earphones. Pirx paid no attention, he plowed on with that line of flame, so thin and so terrible, until it split into a thousand centrifugal ricochets off some stone pillar. Red swirling circles danced before him, but through their swirl he saw a bright blue eye, smaller than the head of a pin, it had opened at the very bottom of the darkness, off to the side somewhere, not where he had been shooting—and before he was able to move the handgrips of the laser, to pivot it around on its swivel, a rock right next to the machine itself exploded like a liquid sun.

“Back!” he bellowed, ducking down by reflex, with the result that he no longer saw anything, but he wouldn’t have seen anything anyway, only those red, slowly fading circles, which turned now black, now golden.

The engine thundered. They were thrown with such violence that Pirx fell all the way to the bottom, then flew to the front, between the knees of the cadet and the radio operator; the cylinders, though they had tied them down securely on the armored wall, made an awful racket. They were rushing backwards, in reverse, there was a horrible crunch beneath the tractor tread, they swerved, careened in the other direction, for a minute it looked like the transporter was going to flip over on its back… The driver, desperately working the gas, the brakes, the clutch, somehow brought that wild skid under control; the machine gave a long quiver and stood still.

“Do we have a seal?!” shouted Pirx, picking himself up off the floor. “A good thing it’s rubber,” he managed to think.

“Intact!”

“Well, that was nice and close,” he said in an altogether different voice now, standing up and straightening his back. And added softly, not without chagrin: “Two hundredths more to the left and I would have had him…”

McCork returned to his place.

“Doctor, that was good, thank you!” called Pirx, already back at the periscope. “Hello, driver, let’s go down the same way we came up. There are some small cliffs over there, a kind of arch—that’s it, right!—drive into the shadow between them and stop…”

Slowly, as if with exaggerated caution, the transporter moved in between the slabs of rock half-buried in sand and froze in their shadow, which rendered it invisible.

“Excellent!” said Pirx almost cheerfully. “Now I need two men, to go with me and do a little reconnoitering…”

McCork raised his hand at the same time as the cadet.

“Good! Now listen, you,” he turned to the others, “will remain here. Don’t move out of the shadow, even if the Setaur should come straight at you—sit quietly. Well, I guess if it walks right into the transporter, then you’ll have to defend yourselves, you have the laser—but that’s not very likely… You,” he said to the driver, “will help this young man remove those cylinders of gas from the wall, and you”—this, to the radio operator—“will call Luna, the cosmodrome, Construction, the patrols, and tell the first who answers that it destroyed one transporter, probably belonging to Construction, and that three men from our machine have gone out to hunt it. So I don’t want anybody barging in with lasers, shooting blindly and so on… And now let’s go!”

Since each of them could carry only one cylinder, they took four. Pirx led his companions not to the top of the “skull,” but a little beyond, where a small, shallow, ascending ravine was visible. They went as far as they could, set the cylinders down by a large boulder, and Pirx ordered the driver to go back. Himself he peered out over the surface of the boulder and trained his binoculars on the interior of the basin. McCork and the cadet crouched down beside him. After a long while he said: