Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

He was still standing upright by the emergency switch when an orange light appeared on the other side of the room. It was an aerial flare, ignited near the door. That was where the maximum cross-fire would have hit him if he had tried to escape that way. But the orange flare was enough to illuminate the whole room. He was visible again.

Another crackle and hiss from miniature weapons — another hail of blows and blaze of pain across his body. He couldn’t take much more. He dived, rolled again, and came up near the desk. As the attackers there fired point-blank into his unprotected chest and side, he hit a sunken wall panel with the palm of his left hand.

The Fire Protection System came on in a fraction of a second. High pressure jets of water and emulsifier cross-crossed the room from floor to ceiling, while the loud warning tone of a bell sounded through the apartment and its nearest neighbors. The emergency low-power wall lights filled the study with sickly green.

Spray and foam filled the room. The miniature weapons at once went silent.

Another reprieve — but for how long?

Luther could not wait for help. He had to do this himself. He hurled himself across the study, soaking and bloodied. He ran first for the place where the attackers had been most dense. Water hit him from all sides, stinging his wounds, sluicing down his ripped skin. He welcomed it.

The minisims were trying to regroup, struggling to stand amid the bombardment of water drops and frothy foam. Ignoring the pain in his hands, Brachis smashed them flat and crushed them one by one between thumb and fingers.

The study door slid open and Godiva appeared. She was naked except for a pair of gauzy briefs. “Luther!”

He ignored her and ran back across the room, a scarlet Nemesis that left bloody, puddled footprints behind him in the carpet. The first group who had attacked him were on the floor by the communications unit, trying to point their weapons up at Luther while a quarter-inch flood of water surged and tugged at their legs. He stomped every one of them, wincing as the angular figures cut into his soft flesh.

A final scatter of shots came from his right. He headed that way, smashing and devastating with bare hands and feet anything that moved.

And suddenly it was over.

By the time that help arrived the sprinkler system was off and the study a junkyard of flattened simulacra. Godiva took Luther through to the bedroom and began to apply antiseptics and surrogate skin. He lay faceup on the bed, his face, chest, and belly an eroded mass of raw wounds connected by shreds of loose skin. He swore continuously as Godiva smoothed on the yellow synthetic flesh. He waved away the emergency service staff. They went back into the study and started to clean up the mess, suctioning the room clean and dry. They were still at it when Esro Mondrian arrived.

Godiva had finished Luther’s left side and was telling him to turn more to the right. He was ignoring her, and talking furiously on a handset.

“Useless!” he growled to Mondrian. “They don’t know one damned thing. Adestis Headquarters won’t have regular staff there until tomorrow, and maintenance can t even tell me if simulacra are missing, never mind what sort. Ouch!” He winced as Godiva began to patch skin onto the ball of his right thumb.

“Does it matter how many?” Mondrian picked up one of the flattened simulacra from the heap at the bedside and inspected it. “I didn’t know they made them this big. What are they used for?”

“To hunt the biggest game. Scorpions and crustaceans, mostly. They can operate under water, but luckily for me they were never designed to handle a rainstorm.”

“But the real question isn’t the minisims. It’s who was handling them. Did you ask?”

“ Adestis Headquarters can’t tell me that, either.” Brachis touched his finger tenderly to the biggest wound on his face, a one-centimeter crater in the middle of his left cheek. “But I know the answer without being told. It’s that bastard’s Artefacts again, it has to be.”

Mondrian was studying Brachis’s pitted and furrowed skin. “Someday, Luther, you must tell me just what you did to earn such undying enmity from Fujitsu that his heirs would try to give you more craters than the surface of Callisto.”

“Never mind what I did. The worst thing I did was, I underestimated him. For that, I deserve everything I’ve been getting.”

“You told me that you had everything locked up tight here in the apartment, so nobody and nothing could get in. What went wrong, Luther?”

“The oldest mistake in the world. It proves the point that I tell every trainee for Survey basic training: It’s the things you don’t expect that get you. I set up this apartment so that nothing could get in through the door without me knowing. Nothing can burrow through the walls or floors or ceilings. I put in a sniffer system to sound an alarm if anything poisonous or radioactive was blown in as gas or dust through the air supply ducts. What I didn’t expect was that something smart and dangerous could actually walk in along the ducts. The openings are only a couple of centimeters across.”

“Big enough.” Mondrian glanced from the simulacrum he was holding to the other man’s battered body. “I’m amazed to see how much firepower one of these things can carry. Surely you don’t need to hit that hard, even for scorpions.”

“They were carrying the absolute top of the weapons line. It took two minisims to handle some of the guns.

That’s the sort of equipment that Adestis normally gives only to a group that they judge to be inexperienced and scared shitless. One shell from the big guns would do for a scorpion. It damned near did for me.”

“Last time we met you told me you thought you had located and destroyed every artefact that the Margrave left. Obviously, you were wrong.” Mondrian nodded his head to the heavy apartment door and its protective locks. “But if you thought you’d got them all, why did you bother with such an elaborate security system?”

“My guardian angel insisted.” Brachis pointed an index finger, its nail half blown away, at the near-nude Godiva. “You’re right, I thought I’d killed the lot. Now I have to start over.’

During the first few frantic minutes, Godiva had been totally absorbed in her work on Luther. She was still wearing only her thin panties and had not thought to put on more clothing. Her only worry was to patch new skin, carefully and completely, onto every one of his wounds. She had not seemed to notice the arrival of Esro Mondrian. But now, directly introduced into the conversation, she seemed to become aware of her own near-nude condition. She applied a final patch to Luther’s shoulder, stooped to kiss him quickly on the lips, and headed for the bathroom. “Ten minutes,” she said. “To put on a robe and dry my hair. Please don’t let him get into more trouble while I’m gone, Esro.”

Her departure created a gap in the conversation of the two men. Brachis, tough as he was, felt drained and distant. With Mondrian silent, he began to think again of the Artefacts. How many more were there? How could he hide from them, how could he destroy them?

His mind drifted back to the silent surface of Hyperion. As soon as he had arranged for delivery of the volatiles, the seven items had been delivered to him as promised from storage. The crew who brought them returned at once to the Deep Vault. They did not look back. They had no interest in knowing — or perhaps they suspected only too well — what Brachis intended to do with his purchase.

The logical thing was to flashfire the seven containers at once and leave the airless surface of Saturn’s moon with minimal delay. Only some dreadful driving streak of curiosity forced Brachis to open them, and thaw the contents.