Transmat World: Chapter 27, Episode 2
Center of the Forward Cylinder, Tuesday, December 7, 2145 A.D.
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“Chrome Dome, stay inside the airlock,” said Wundee. “Keep an eye out both ways in the tube. Let us go investigate.”
Chrome Dome went back into the airlock, returned it to vacuum, cracked the outer door, extruded two slender optical fibers from his collection of delicate appendages, and pointed one up and one down just outside the doorframe.
Wundee and the rest of the crew approached the dim light falling from the spherical cavity with caution. In the center was a large, circular enduraplast door. Around that door, like an afterthought, a strip of enduraplast lay on the stasis floor. Vision ports, circuits and batteries were attached in a haphazard manner around the circumference. Wundee bent down to investigate. The mechanisms strained to focus on him and made sounds. He magnified his hearing so that the small, tinny sounds of insane chatter were clear. Listening for a few seconds, he looked up to find the four other, larger strips of plastic attached at each level of the cavity with similar pitiful entities plastered along their length.
“This is a bad place,” said Wundee.
Hide. Someone is coming, said Chrome Dome over the secure radio band. He had filled the lock with air and surreptitiously moved away from the inner door. Everyone disbanded in different directions, finding cover behind odd heaps of robotic parts or mysterious machinery. Wundee flew straight up, hiding behind an air duct, affording him a view of the floor and the control panel hidden under the lip of that first circular opening.
A strikemech entered, went straight to the control panel and punched a button. The circular plastic door irised open, revealing the massive gears of the interior of the inner door of an airlock 100 yards in diameter. A stasis sphere rose from the tube. The door shut, and the sphere settled on top of it. The lights in the cavity brightened. Four centuks later the stasis sphere vanished with a large pop. Xenon Flash appeared on the door discharging his weapon, barely missing the enduraplast strip of robot parts.
Wundee saw the weapon torn from Xenon’s grasp and the robot snatched from the floor and out of sight by invisible tendons of artificial gravity.
“Yes, look at your compatriots,” said the Prime Mechanical. “This is what the quest for anarchy gets you. Now tell me where your precious Newlux is or you will join them.”
“Last I know Spoke Three, heading for the Aft Cylinder for a strategic meeting with his seconds,” said Xenon.
“My spies place him closer to Spoke Seven, you lying piece of dross.”
Wundee heard a rending noise like someone tearing a Xerox copier in two.
“Take him to extraction, have his memories recorded and bring his skeletonized brain back here for mounting. Next!”
He is one of my freemech fighters, said Circuit Breaker.
Chrome. Circuit. Intercept and disable the strikemechs taking that freemech away. Take their chips. On my count three.
Wundee dropped from his hiding place while aiming a beanbag at the strikemech controlling the door.
Three, said Wundee as a swarm of lights bespeaks the strikemech’s incapacity.
Chrome Dome and Lieutenant Circuit Breaker slunk out the oval door they came in.
“NEXT!” screamed Maxlux.
Wundee pushed the same button the operator used. The door expanded without noise. Another tripped stasis mine appeared. He was not sure what he would do next. If there were more Free Machine Action Committee soldiers, they could intercept and salvage core personality and memory chips after interrogation. If it was the See Lurchin’, he would have to improvise.
One of the things Maxlux tried to correct in the universe was pesky statistical anomalies. If he had his way everything would be predictable, and his predictions would always prevail. His success, so far, had stemmed from controlling situations to the point of eliminating surprise. Loading the die became an acceptable, even preferable, method to control destiny for Maxlux. A master cheat at the gamble of existence should be ready for some bad beats — probably not what Maxlux pondered as he hit the switch to turn off the stasis field at the bottom of his macabre arena.
It was over in one thirtieth of a second. See Lurchin’ came blasting out of the stasis mine at 25,000 miles per hour, heading straight for Maxlux, and disappeared with a pop. There was an abrupt silence.
We have their chips, said Chrome Dome.
Dome, Breaker, enter on the third level opening, said Wundee.
Everyone else, rush the cavity from the first floor.
They met on the third level. Three of the Prime’s strikemechs stood like statues a few feet from Maxlux. They were bean-bagged and de-chipped.
Maxlux remained motionless at the control panel. See Lurchin’s porcupine-like defense quills were designed to splinter in a spiral, piercing and flexing like springs to protect the hull from impact loads. Hundreds of shards of carbon nanotube and titanium glass curled downward toward the center of the arena, cut neatly on the ends and left hanging by See Lurchin’s protective Transmat jump. They spiraled upward through the control panel and the Supreme Arbiter’s upper torso, ending in frayed balls of fiber with control panel and Maxlux particles mixed in. The Prime’s Kolpak-copied, prehensile nose was replaced by a portion of See Lurchin’ quill. Somewhere inside the Supreme Arbiter’s head it splintered again and again. The tough material blossomed from several places on the back of the artificial Kolpak’s skull.
Motor function circuits were cut, but the brain functions on a small back-up battery, and front vision ports had been spared. Cameras and inside-out Transmats on the ends of the quills were smashed, but not before doing their job of transmitting bits of the control panel and Maxlux to a lab somewhere safe in the Solar System. That, in turn, told See Lurchin’ to jump because there was something solid in its way.
Cavity is secure, said a freemech from the fourth level.
As they stoodd around and gawked, Wundee listened to the silence. No, it wasn’t silent. Perhaps his emotive circuits were overworked, but he thought he heard a tiny sound filling the spherical cavity. He looked across the open space and every imaging sensor, every vision port, pointed at Maxlux. He cranked his audio detectors to maximum sensitivity, and a full-range roar of existential white noise inundated him. They poured all the power of their slight batteries into a celebratory racket. His emotive circuits vibrated at such a frequency as to make the digits on his hands curl inward and his head bow down. From his experience on Earth, he knew this was a situation in which a human might leak fluid from their vision ports. Perhaps this was his emotive circuit’s analog to “crying.”
Wundee directed his own sight upward toward the unseen stars of the Milky Way and lent some power to their screams of vindication and victory.
You okay? asked Lieutenant Breaker.
I am much better now, thanks.
Wundee watched as the electric-rat battery charger rooted around the Prime Mechanical’s feet and then gave up on finding a connection. It moved on to a creature whose little lens swivels were about to pop a pin trying to take in all the action.
“I am Wundee; you will all be freed,” said Wundee to the inhabitants of the cavity, eliciting another ghost bellow of appreciation. He rummaged around the fallen strikemechs until he found a communicator. It tied in by relays to communications outside the giant stasis pancake stack of floors that make up the Forward Cylinder.
“Newlux, be on the lookout for a huge version of a spherical little Kolpac swamp predator known as a constabulator floating about with some of its stabules damaged. Let me know when it is spotted. Oh, by the way, Maxlux is inactivated and I …we … did it without the help of my magnificent new body which you currently inhabit that was supposed to be mine.”
Wundee closed the connection before Newlux answered and wandered off with the others to explore the ex-Prime Mechanical’s quarters.
