Transmat World: Chapter 31
Prime Mechanical’s alternate emergency quarters, 8:45 A.M., Wednesday, December 8, 2145 A.D.
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Menacing pinpoints of red light disturbed the darkness as vision ports on the Prime’s backup body came alive. Panels of light-emitting membrane flickered on. They brightened the immediate area of an endless cavity. The light hugged the wall and floor, unable to make the voyage across or up without attenuating to extinction. Vague, distant shapes are the only hint of limits to the space.
This new body bore little resemblance to the one Mundeen constructed millions of rotations ago. The head was missing. An inverted triangle twenty feet on a side and over a yard thick comprised the torso. Overlapping stasis field plate mimicked Kolpakian body scales, providing armor. Two arms extended from each top corner of the torso. Another pair sprouted below those. Two legs attached just above each side of the bottom tip. Stasis field toroids with nested, articulating spherical concavities made up the limbs. Large near the torso, they grew ever smaller toward the tip. Arms ended in six-digit grasping mechanisms for hands. The legs had circular pads for feet with ten oversized digits and extensible claws. Ridges on the nesting surfaces of the toroids held in place little stasis field ball bearings. The arms and legs were packed with hydraulics. The twenty-foot appendages had the agility of snakes and the power of locomotives. Small, circular portals in the front and back of the central portion of the torso indicated vision lenses, the only apparent Achilles Heel, but that was an illusion. Stasis shields integral to the torso backed the video receptor ports. The new body stood 35 feet tall.
The torso shielded a small fusion reactor, gyroscopes, and hydraulic pumps. It also protected the CPU, memory, and emotive chips representing the personality of Maxlux. The memory chips retained everything up to the incident in the stasis mine reception chamber. As these memories replayed in his new mind, Maxlux ripped first one arm and then another from its wall recession, followed by the legs. He ripped trickle chargers and hard communication lines from his body like so many unneeded intravenous tubes. Despite his size, he made quick and fluid moves to a communication panel and operated the controls. His CPU used extra appendages as though they had always been there.
VINCE MILLER. LET’S TALK. FOLLOW THE ARROWS.
VINCE MILLER. LET’S TALK. FOLLOW THE ARROWS.
VINCE MILLER. LET’S TALK. FOLLOW THE ARROWS.
Maxlux turned off the broadcast and flicked on camera feeds from different parts of Harbinger until he found the marching arrows. They pointed to a specific spot on the Rim. He was inside a structural element of the stasis field cage that kept the star Betilon aligned with the outer frame of Rim and Spokes. This particular beam was two million miles in diameter and had enough room to house even an oversized alternative Prime Mechanical, whose title now more befitted the reality. His new quarters had no ceiling. Shadowy geometrical shapes just visible thousands of miles away were the outer cowlings of world-sized gravity generators designed to make a star stay put.
The cage arm was only 20 degrees out of rotation with the arrows. An opening on the outer surface of the arm away from the star Betilon announced itself in an outline of lights. Maxlux stopped on his way to rummage a weapon locker the size of an airplane hangar and picked up a gamma ray laser retired from blasting space debris approaching Harbinger. A yard-wide strip of dervich leather allowed him to sling it across the back of his torso. A power cord the size of an elephant’s trunk plugged into a socket on his torso. Now the laser was powered by fusion. Maxlux went to the exit, made a leap into the void, and followed the arrows.
