Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

He did know, in a low, cold-blooded way, that Shiao was the one person here—other than himself—that he’d be most willing to sacrifice, if such sacrifice could not be helped. Shiao was the person most willing to sacrifice himself , and also the one most qualified—far more qualified than Bruno— to break into the fortress of a mad genius.

The sun moved out of the bow window, which turned clear again, showing stars and a few wispy tendrils of solar corona. Their little ship could be anywhere, really; looking up there gave no impression that they were about to land on a planet.

“All right,” Bruno said finally, “Shiao and I will don space suits and attempt to seize control of Marlon’s study, wherever it may be. I’m not sure whether we can reverse the damage he’s done, but if so that will be the likeliest place from which to accomplish it. The rest of you stay with the ship.”

“I object,” Vivian said immediately, from her little couch beside Shiao’s own. “I am a Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary.”

“Also a sixteen-year-old girl,” Bruno and Shiao said together.

“I didn’t have any heroics in mind, thank you,” she said, with a cool stiffness that belied her age. “I’m thinking of Declarant Sykes’ household control systems. There must be an interface somewhere, and if I can find it I may be able to issue law-enforcement overrides to the resident intelligence. If not, I may at least be able to sabotage it in some way.”

Bruno thought about this. In no way did he wish to further endanger Vivian’s life. There was danger enough, without sending her off to the mercies of armed robots and other household security systems.

“None of us have backup patterns we can rely on,” he reminded her. “Our actions here carry the sting of permanence. If you die, you’ll die .”

“I’m aware of that, Declarant.”

“Hmm. Yes. Well, I leave it up to Shiao. He seems quite protective of you.”

“I—” Shiao began, but was immediately interrupted.

“I order you to agree,” Vivian said.

Shiao reddened; his protective instincts were suddenly frustrated, bottled in. He didn’t like that one bit.

“Cheng,” she warned, her copper eyes flashing angrily, “this won’t look good on my report. Physically, I’m sure you could prevent me, but you do not want to refuse a direct order. Nor would you want, in any way, to endanger this mission. Would you like to be the cause of our failure?”

“I… would not,” he said, with visible effort.

“I’ll take every precaution,” she said, softening. “I have no desire to upset you.”

He slumped back into his couch. “I’ll agree, Commandant-Inspector, on the sole condition that you not go alone.”

“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.