“Achilles, don these, for the world knows your plight,” Doc said, handing Dean a pair of leather boots.
The youngster tried them on, delightedly finding the footgear to be a near-perfect fit. “Bit large,” he commented, standing and stamping his feet.
“You’ll grow into them,” Ryan said, his expression belying the stern tone.
“Wait a moment,” Amanda said, going to her saddlebags. “I have something here that might work better than those.”
A warning signal flared through every nerve, and Krysty drew the .38 Ruger but Doc and Jak were between her and the woman. Both of the blonde’s hands were out of sight inside the bags doing something.
“Ryan!” Krysty yelled. “Something’s wrong! Stop her!”
But before anybody could react, an intense hissing sound came from the motorcycle. Nothing was visible, but Doc and Dean toppled limply to the ground. Scowling, Ryan managed to pull his hand-blaster when he also folded.
“It’s gas!” Mildred cried, drawing her .38 blaster. But the weapon fell from nerveless hands and she slumped as if dead.
Drawing a knife, Jak held his breath and backed iway, but be also folded. Over the loud hissing, Amanda laughed contemptuously as J.B. tried to fire the Uzi and failed, crumbling as if every bone in his body were dissolved. Even though she had a clear shot, Krysty dropped her pistol and tried to shut the door when blackness swallowed her whole.
Chapter Ten
Blackness. Total and complete. The dead silence was broken only by the echo of a drip striking water, then a creak of straining metal and a rumble of collapsing stonework. A brief flicker of greenish light shattered the dark, then a second flicker. There was the soft high-pitched whine of accumulators releasing stored power and servomotors revving to operational speeds.
In agonizing slowness, circuits grew warm, then solder cracked and wires parted. Fat sparks crawled like neon spiders over the shattered transistors, broken chips, smashed relays and cracked motherboard of the General Electric Ranger Mark IV before its auxiliary CDPs flared into microsecond life again.
The autorepair systems strained against the electronic and physical damage. Reserve power flowed from the nuke batteries past pulverized circuit boards and along the very alloy framework of the annihilated tank until finally reaching relays and incandescent bus bars. Most of the sensors were offline, some completely dead. The few still working indicated impossible things, so the diagnostic systems promptly disconnected the malfunctioning elements. But the remaining handful registered that water rich with decaying leaves and faint traces of human waste were flowing over the decimated vehicle. Memory chips struggled to identify the environment, and the answer came soon enough: a sewer. The Ranger was in a city sewer. High probability: driven through the street and into the underground pipes by the force from above. The circuits had no solid data on what was the generating factor of the crushing blow, but from the concrete dust, glass splinters, broken bricks and such, it postulated a falling building.
Then alarms sounded. Trace levels of gallium, arsenic and selenium were found in the muddy water. Subprocessors indicated very high probabilities that there were computers in the structure above the Ranger. If the repair droids could only reach those, the machine could get back online. Once more, the autorepair systems tried valiantly to function, and failed. They tried again, and failed again.
Searching for an answer to the repair problem, complex arrays of sophisticated Thinking Wires surged with stored bytes, and virtual-reality monitors flashed random data, blueprints and schematics. A hundred thousand miscellaneous files were opened and read as the diagnostic software searched for the correct command prefixes. Stored bits of conversation and recorded visuals had to be listened to endlessly as the search continued at the speed of light. One file was heard a thousand times before the loop could be severed and the work continued.
Sluggishly, the main data processor of the Ranger came awake. A soft ethereal glow began to tint the dark as a series of small submonitors came to life. Each showed the view around the hull from a different direction, including directly behind and straight above. No details, only brown. Secret codes and complex commands started to scroll on the arced array of virtual screens, and the gloom wildly strobed with the combined pyrotechnic effect. Cybernetic relays slid into position, superconductor bus bars hummed alive and a torrent of fresh electricity from miniature nuke batteries flooded deactivated circuits with a massive infusion of power.