The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (46 page)

With a mighty effort of will, Suss forced the pounding words out of her mind. Marshaling all her strength, she found a way to block them out, set up a wall she could hide behind at least for a moment.

The helmet was through with subtle suggestions, coy insinuations. It no longer even asked to be replaced on Jameson’s head, no doubt sensing that the time was come to find a new steed. It wanted Suss.

And it was going to have her. She knew that, knew that her will could not resist indefinitely under this onslaught. Already she twice had to keep her own hands from straying, reaching for the wad of fabric that still hung before her eyes. All she needed to do was grab at it with one hand while the other stretched a bit to hold the pliers apart. The free hand would take the fabric, jam it back between the plier jaws. Then she could safely close the pliers, cross the compartment and TAKE THE HELMET. PUT IT—

She blinked, shook her head, and realized her left hand was already
reaching
for that wad of fabric. She snatched it back and clamped it grimly around the plier handle.

“Stop!” she screamed, tears welling up in her eyes. But in zero G tears did not flow. They hung in her eyes, blurring her vision. She shook her head to shake the tears off. “Stop it now or I let the switch go! Stop!”

She
had
to let go now, before it won. Better she died than this thing seized the Pact. Closing her eyes, calming herself as best she could, determined to meet the end with dignity, she relaxed her hold on the pliers, released them.

Nothing happened.

She opened her eyes and saw that her hands had not moved. But she had
felt
them move,
felt
herself let go of the pliers. But nothing was but what was not. The helmet didn’t care what Suss
thought
she was doing, but it was not going to let her end it yet. It was winning, starting to control her nervous system. A wave of despair washed over her, and Suss could no longer tell if it was genuine, or a fraudulent feeling imposed by the helmet.

But there were more immediate dangers than her own emotions. Suss stared down at her hands and saw the left one relaxing its grip again. Wrestling against the unseen enemy, an enemy literally inside her head, she forced her fingers back down,
demanded
that they wrap themselves around the pliers. Reluctantly, her hand cooperated.

She was holding out for the moment. But she knew it could not last.

DISARM THE WEAPON. TAKE THE HELMET. PUT IT ON. DISARM—

###

“Normal doctrine is you don’t
use
fragmentation grenades in a pressurized tunnel,” Private Cormack explained as he started arming the vicious-looking things. His squad mate pulled the grapefruit-sized grenades out of the carrykit and set to work as well. The assault team had broken all records hot-footing the frag-grenades from the
Banquo’s
hold to the forward point of march. The distance covered wasn’t anything much, just a few kilometers all told—but with such minor obstacles as getting
Banquo
to lower her shields, asteroid corridors still filled with the floating, churning dust and debris of battle, and the occasional sniper robot still on patrol.

“The fragments are supposed to be slowed too much by air pressure,” Cormack went on. “The theory is you get more killing power from the shock waves of standard explosives. Well, maybe if you’re shooting at people. But robots can stand a heavy overpressure and not even notice. Now hit them with a saturation fire of these babies and—”

“Cut the shop talk and get those damn things ready,” Spencer snapped. They were cutting it close, too damn close. He could
feel
it. Somewhere, and somewhere close, that damnable helmet was fighting back.
“Move it.”

“Uh, yessir,” Cormack said. “That’s fifty of them, set with five-second delay timers triggered by first impact.”

Spencer turned and faced the rear of the tunnel. “Everyone but the grenadiers and flame specialists, two hundred meters back and take cover. There might be a lot of debris flying.” The rest of the assault team backed away down the tunnel.

Tallen Deyi looked uncertainly at the small team of troopers preparing the weapons. “Cormack, what the goddamned hell do we do if one of those things caroms
our
way?”

Cormack shrugged, an exaggerated gesture meant to be understood through a pressure suit. “I dunno, Sir. Throw ’em back?”

“Terrific,” Tallen replied.

Spencer grinned edgily, feeling a sense of gallows humor. “In that case Cormack, let’s hope your squad has some good catchers. Proceed at will.”

Cormack towed the carrykit full of now-armed frag grenades toward the bend in the corridor. The first thing he threw was a smoke bomb, bouncing it off the corner wall so it caromed back down toward the robots. Spencer snapped his flexiscope around the corner at the same moment to watch. The bomb died in a vicious hail of repulsor fire—but that was of little matter to a smoke bomb that was already going off. The corridor instantly filled with a thick black smoke.

The hope was that the robots used normal vision to aim, and couldn’t shoot what they couldn’t see. It seemed to work—the robots stopped shooting. The asteroid’s air system kept a steady breeze moving down the corridor, blowing straight at the robots.

Cormack threw a frag-grenade five seconds after the smoke bomb, and another five seconds after that, and another, and another, bouncing each off the corner wall, sending the grenade rebounding off the tunnel wall toward the target.

The first of the grenades blew just short of the smoke, filling the corridor around it with hundreds of shaped pieces of armor-piercing alloy. Much of the shrapnel merely slammed into the rock wall—but some of it drove down into the smoke, toward the robots. Spencer heard the screaming impact of metal on metal.

Cormack cackled gleefully and threw the next grenade.
So much for high tech,
Spencer thought. In a war against a nightmare world of intelligent machines, it came down to one guy who knew how to bounce bombs off a wall.

Spencer looked up from the scope to the marines. One of Cormack’s squad mates began throwing more smoke bombs and grenades. A third was there at the ready in the inevitable but heart-stopping moment a grenade suddenly sprouted up
out
of the smoke. She caught the bomblet and heaved it back the way it had come.

Through the scope, all was carnage, chaos. Disembodied bits of robot bodies blossomed out through the smoke, slamming into the corridor walls. The savage noise of repulsor fire started up again, but it was impossible to see which robot was firing, or at what. Spencer suspected the robots did not know, either. Overload them enough, and robots will behave a great deal like panicking humans.

Another grenade dove down into the smoke and exploded. “Flamers,” Spencer ordered. “Fire in volley.” Instantly, the two flame gunners came to the fore. They hooked the flexible nozzles of the flame guns around the corner and fired blind.

The flame guns were baby variants of plasma guns, firing a weaker, cooler, fusion pulse—but there was nothing weak or cool about their shots from where Spencer watched through the flexiscope. The sun-bright tongues of flame licked down the corridor, banishing the smoke, stabbing down into the ranks of the robots.

A wall of superheated air slapped back up the corridor, singeing Spencer’s eyebrows. The flexiscope started melting in his pressure-suit gloves. He slammed shut his helmet visor and scrambled back, now understanding perfectly well why it was against the doctrine to use flames inside an asteroid. Spencer could not imagine any of the robots could have survived the attack.

“Cease fire!” he ordered. “Cormack! How long until the corridor cools enough for us to move up it?”

“We can move now, Sir, if we use our climbing gear instead of pushing ourselves with hands and feet. Our rock hammers and stuff are insulated. And our suits
shouldn’t
melt if we touch the walls for a second or two.”

“Then move out,
fast
—and watch out for any robots we missed. Relay that to the rest of the team,” Spencer ordered.

Cormack nodded and punched the appropriate frequency up. “Cormack relaying for CO. Advance to jump-off point, then use hot-rock climbing. Enemy may still have effectives in zone, so watch your asses.”

Spencer pulled his own rock hammer out of his equipment rack. With the hammer in one hand and his repulsor in the other, he followed Cormack around the corner into the half-molten hell of the next stretch of corridor.

He was surprised at the ease with which he could propel himself, hooking the hammer into rock and giving a gentle tug. The corridor was a little patch of hell, the rock walls glowing red, dismembered robot arms and legs and heads pinwheeling past, with small parts still shorting and spitting sparks, most of the severed limbs still flexing spasmodically as joint controls shorted and reshorted. Smoke and dust twisted and knotted through the air, shrouding all in a deathly gloom.

There was the quick rattle of a low-power repulsor from up ahead, answered by return fire from a half-dozen marines. But return fire could not help Cormack. His life’s blood pumping from a severed artery in his neck, the young marine died with a look of utmost surprise on his face.

Spencer felt the mad urge to rush the marine back to the aid station, nurse him back to life personally, but forced himself to let the dead boy go, let his body behind to float free in that hell. There was nothing Spencer could do except make Cormack’s death be worthwhile, be
for
something.

If anything could do that.

Tallen and the rest of the squad following close behind, and the rest of the force after them, Spencer pressed on into a cooler corridor, beyond the sun-core radiance.

Now he could feel it directly in his own head, in some terrifyingly familiar way. The scar on the back of his head suddenly throbbed in pain, reacting not to any physical hurt, but to a nightmare memory.

A
machine
was pounding thoughts, feelings, into his head. But this was no mere numb-rig, no crude wirehead feel-good circuit, but a
mind,
a malevolent, thinking, hating
mind,
slamming thoughts, ideas, feelings into his skull.

And he was just catching the fringes, the edges of the assault. He didn’t need to guess who was receiving the brunt of it all.

He hurried forward, leading his troops past the roasting-hot corridor. The passage ended in a T-intersection. The opposite wall of the intersection was made from the grey material, but Spencer didn’t bother worrying about that. He drew up short of the cross-corridor and let his marines catch up. He pulled his sketch map from his pocket again and examined it.

It showed this corridor emptying right into the command center, and to the best of his recollection, so had the map display he had copied it from. Maybe the map scale had simply been too large to allow minor details like this cross-corridor. It must be that one or both directions led to the command center itself.

“Eight troopers down the lefthand side with Commander Deyi, another eight come with me down the right,” Spencer ordered. “The rest of you stand by and watch our back.” Without another word, he kicked off from the side of the main corridor and made his way along the cross-corridor.

The mental onslaught pounded on, slamming down into his brain. It seemed as if the others were unaware of it, or could not feel it as strongly. No one commented or complained. Maybe they just chalked it up to natural fear under the circumstances.

But Spencer was a former wirehead, and he was sensitized. He
felt
it. He knew what it was, knew Suss was taking the full force of the attack. He dug in again with his rock hammer and threw himself forward, pivoting a bit to bring himself around a bend in the strange grey corridor. He swung around—

—Right into the face of a huge, red-painted humanoid robot.

Reflex took over before Spencer had a real chance to think. The hammer was in his hand, and it was too close in for the repulsor. He brought the hammer down on the robot’s face, slamming into the thing’s sensor circuits, smashing it, setting off a shower of sparks. His other hand, still holding the repulsor, came up before he even knew he had seen the other robot.

He fired point-blank, the stream of supersonic glass pellets blasting a fist-sized hole through the second robot’s carapace. Both of them were ruined junk by the time the marines arrived behind him. One of the marines looked over the tin men and nodded. “Nice work, Captain.”

But they had their backs to me,
Spencer thought.
As if the danger they were guarding against was ahead of them, not behind.

“Captain, Deyi here,” Tallen’s voice came in his ear. “Nothing here. Just a stretch of that weird grey wallcovering, and a damaged blast door. Controls shot up, and the manual control’s out, too. It must be dogged shut from the inside.”

“I copy that, Tallen. Stand by.”
The danger was ahead of them,
Spencer thought. He made his way around the corner—and came upon a tableau.

The figure of an old man in a powerchair, his back to Spencer, arms outstretched over his head. Between his hands, hovering quietly in mid-air, the helmet. The gleaming, shining, lovely cause of all this evil. The moment Spencer looked on it, the pounding tirade in his head redoubled. Suddenly he could feel the words, the ideas the helmet was silently shouting.

DISARM THE WEAPON. TAKE THE HELMET. PUT IT ON. DISARM THE WEAPON. TAKE THE HELMET—

Spencer forced the foreign thoughts away, and glanced at the marines behind him.
Now
they could feel it, Spencer could tell that in a glance at their puzzled and frightened faces.

Spencer turned to look beyond Jameson and his nemesis. They stood before an open blast door with a hole cut through it, the command center framed by the door.

He saw Suss, stripped to her underwear, hunched up in the far corner of the compartment, her hands clenched tight over some sort of gadget with wires trailing from it, her face the very mirror of madness, of a purpose set and chosen against all odds or hope, her jaw muscles spasming with strain, a blob of spittle forming at the corner of her lips.