Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

But the fight wasn’t over yet. The fax machine had begun to spit out new designs: tentacled robots capable of leaving a damaged limb behind, and soon afterward, toylike robots too small and fast and numerous to hold at bay. The surviving longarms had got their act together as well, falling back to a position along the far wall, from which they hurled a staggering stream of explosive bullets while slowly fanning out along the walls. Bruno’s rage began to cool; he sensed the danger all around him. These were not tenpins, after all, but vicious, remorseless killing machines that would take the first opening he provided them.

He had to get to that fax , had to shut it down. It was the source of all these enemies, and who knew what it might spew out next?

“To the fax!” he said to Shiao.

Wobbling slightly on his bullet-scarred feet, Shiao finally came up alongside Bruno. The two began to advance, but resistance ahead was stiff, the new robots less and less willing to give ground, and harder and harder to score with a clean kill. Multijointed impervium tentacles, blitter-struck and writhing madly, piled up in drifts on the floor ahead of them, while the robots who’d lost them fought on with grim, fearless determination.

It could have gone on like that for a long time, inch by bloody, oily inch, had a new factor not entered the fray. “Mewl!” a battered-looking robot of tin and gold cried, wading into the carnage to stomp and stomp and stomp the little toy soldiers. “My! My! Mewl!”

“Hugo!” Bruno cried, alarmed for his friend. “Go back. Go back to the ship!”

“Mewl!” Hugo replied sternly, looking Bruno full in the face while stomping flat yet another little robot.

The enemy robots seemed perplexed for a moment, unsure what to make of this development. It didn’t take them long to figure it out, though—within seconds Hugo was swarmed, covered head to toe in angry little robots, and a tentacled monstrosity was advancing, flailing about with all manner of evil weapons.

But Shiao saw that moment of confusion, the distraction of the toy soldiers, and struck hard, slicing half the tentacles off another monstrosity and driving a sharp thrust directly into the heart of a third. They fought on, of course, but soon Bruno was there beside him, laying about with the blitter-staff, and finally the tentacled robots—there were five of them now—began to fall.

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.