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tiptoe-soft, sneaking in for ambush. She bellowed something, a warning, a
battle cry, the same instant I was screaming, "Run!" Then she fired her whole
magazine of poppers into the onrushing pack.
Thunder. Rocket blasts lit the whole tunnel, flame venting out the exhaust
ports of Paulette's shoulder launcher.
Four missiles. More than four androids.
Boom, the sound of impact. Crackle, the zap of lightning shorting out robot
circuits. Then cough-cough-cough-cough-cough, a flurry of jelly guns unloading
on the nearest target.
Paulette staggered back from the impact acid wads slapping against her body
armor, splotching over her chest, arms, helmet. Her armor bloomed with smoke,
every acid drop keen to burn its way through the plastic shell and blister the
woman inside.
"Get out!" Daunt yelled at her... but in the split second Paulette had before
the robots were on top of her, she charged toward us rather than heading back
to the mine entrance.
So. All five of us were blocked in, with an army of gun-toting androids
between us and the exit.
Jolly.
Daunt fired his four robot-poppers up the tunnel. The bang of their ignition
damn near deafened me... that plus the echoes crashing off the rock walls,
pummeling like fists on my eardrums.Fé leejedd, I thought witlessly; I hear
the thunder. Then the poppers struck and four more androids went down, legs
and arms jerking in short-circuit spasms.
Not good enough. I counted four robots still on their feet, black silhouettes
outside the shine of Tic's torch.
Paulette raced toward us, wrapped in peels of acid smoke; and as she ran, she
slapped a button on the wrist of her armor. Inside my head, I felt like
someone had just shouted, "Mayday, Mayday!" though I hadn't heard the actual
words. An emergency alert to Protection Central. I decided to add my own:Xé,
if you have any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a precious good time to
trot them out.
Nothing. Then Ramos was pulling my arm, shouting words my buggy-whipped ears
couldn't hear. I got the message anyway: retreat down the tunnel.
Where else? Except that if this mine was like the ones near Sallysweet River,
we'd soon run out of retreating room: the top level always dead-ended at a
pithead. Once upon a time, such pitheads may have held elevators to transport
miners down to lower levels, and ore back up. But after three thousand years,
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the elevator sure as deviltry wouldn't be working... which meant we'd just
have the elevator shaft. A sheer drop into the depths.
Still... better a nice clean fall than chug-a-lugging acid.
Run, run, run: us, then the robots in pursuit. We all sprinted full speed,
except Tic, who launched himself into a downward glide that matched our pace.
To keep his hands free, he'd jammed the torch-wand under the straps of his
tote pack. The light reflecting off his scaly chest had a glowery gray-blue
cast to it... but Tic was far from collapsing with the jitters. As he flew, he
shouted back over his shoulder at the androids. "Stop, you're burning us!
Stop, you're freezing us! Stop, you're drowning us!"
"What the hell are you raving about?" Daunt snapped.
Ramos and I didn't try to explain. "Stop, you're smothering us!" Tic hollered
at the robots. "Stop, you're strangling us! Stop, you're squeezing too hard!"
"Stop," Paulette said, "we've hit a dead end." The pithead. Tic's torch
showed a blank wall in front of us, broken by a black hole opening downward.
Above the hole hung a few rusty twists of metal, all that was left of the
elevator mechanism.
"The sides are sheer rock," Daunt said, looking into the shaft. "Straight
down."
"The robots are going to fire again," Paulette shouted from behind us. I
glanced over my shoulder in time to see her spin to face the shots and spread
her arms wide. Trying to protect us from the acid barrage by blocking it with
her body.
Daunt shouted, "No!" Then four blobs of goo splashed simultaneously against
Paulette's ravaged armor, scattering sticky beads all over her body. Dozens of
droplets found their way through holes in the armor, holes burned by the
previous round of shots. Paulette sucked in her breath, then screamed, "Shit!
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!"
"Don't say that!" Ramos bellowed. Shoving past Tic, she yelled furiously at
the robots, "Stop, you're stabbing us. Stop, you're making us bleed!" Festina:
doing the only thing left. "Grab my waist," Tic barked at me. "I can parachute
you down to the next level."
"And run out on everyone else?"
"Save yourself, damn it!" Ramos called over her shoulder.
"Yes, go! Now!" That came from Daunt; he'd thrown himself forward the moment
Paulette was hit, and now stood between her and the androids. The androids had
stopped their advance, all four of them standing across the tunnel like a
wall, giving their jelly guns another few seconds to pressurize. They seemed
in no hurry; they had us all in range.
"Faye!" Tic said. "Grab me! There's no time left."
But there was.
Flickering into existence from nowhere, a tube of light appeared in the
tunnel. Purple. Blue. Green. One end of the tube opened wide, straight in
front of me. The rest of it stretched back up the shaft, floating weightless
in the air, over the heads of the androids and on into the distance. In some
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spots, the tube narrowed to the breadth of my arm; in others, it widened to
fill the whole tunnel, its diameter fluctuating from moment to moment,
shimmering peacock tinsel.
Tic gasped in surprise. "Xé?"
"No, it's a Sperm-tail," Ramos told him. "Escape route."
Before I could react, she slammed me hard across the shoulders and knocked me
into the tube.
I'd shot through transport tubes before, but never in the unprotected flesh.
To ride Bonaventure's up-sleeve, you always got put into stasis: sit down in a
transport capsule, wait for the stasis field to on, and next thing you
know, an attendant says, "Welcome to North Orbital Terminus." No jolt, no
bump, no sensation of passage.
But this time, I wasn't in stasis.
Forward I flew helpless-forward through the tube. When it compressed, I
compressed. When it expanded, I did too. Bones didn't crunch, even as I
squeezed through tight spots a centimeter across or ballooned out fat several
meters wide... but I felt it all, felt my body pulled like plasticine,
twisted-kneaded-sculpted to match the peacock tube's shape. The forces working
me were blandly impersonal, crushing me, then rolling me out pastry-style; yet
beyond all that wrenching and wringing I got the feel of a tangible sentience.
Something thatknew me. Something that felt queer-familiar.
Who? What?
But no time to mull over questions. Suddenly I was spat clear out of the
tube, onto a scratchy heap of carpet moss one of those thin beds that grew [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]