Blake reached the top of the crew module. He careened to a halt against the outer hatch of the main airlock, reached to punch the switches— —and yanked his hand back as if he’d been scalded.
Sparta pulled herself to a stop below him. “Go, Blake, go!” she barked, before she saw what he saw, the red sign blazing: WARNING. VACUUM. “They must’ve sealed off the security area,” she said, “let it go to vacuum.”
“Spacesuits—on the wall beside you.”
The robot’s progress was a demolition derby; an endless mashing and tearing of metal and plastic. Any moment it would rip through the hull, and then they would perish in vacuum.
“No time,” she said. “Our only chance is to disable it.”
“Do what?”
“Not here. We’re trapped.”
She dived back down to the flight deck. He fumbled after her. To him the place was pitch dark but for the glow of the console lights, but she saw everything. She could see through the steel deck to what looked like the glow of an oncoming white dwarf star.
“Forget that damned book!” she yelled at Blake—but he held onto the exquisite counterfeit as if it were worth as much as his life. The robot arrived on the flight deck at the same time he did, a creature of nightmare preceded by the flare of its radiators. Having widened the corridor opening with its saw-toothed proboscis, its bristling sensors appeared first above the edge of the hole, followed in milliseconds by its great samurai-helmet head thrusting into the room. Its head swiveled in rapid jerks, diamondpaned compound eyes reflecting the multi-colored glow from the instrument panel.
The wave of heat from its radiators was enough to send Blake and Sparta thrashing away in retreat.
The robot’s glittering eyes fixed on Sparta. Its leg motors accelerated with a whine, and it jumped—five and a half weightless tonnes, its ore-scoops out-stretched—toward the corner of ceiling where she cringed. She possessed a small fraction of the machine’s mass and could accelerate much faster; by the time it had smashed into the flight deck ceiling she was bouncing off the floor.
“Fire extinguisher,” Blake cried, and for a half second she thought he’d panicked, lost his wits—what good’s a fire extinguisher against a nuclear reactor?—but in the next half second she realized that the heat had inspired him.
That the mining robot was not built to work in freefall gave them a slim advantage in the battle. One other advantage, hardly more robust, had occurred to her when she’d leaped to evade its grasp. The brute machine acted as if it had a personal grudge—against her. It didn’t want to just punch a hole in the ship and let her die, drunk on hypoxia. It wanted to tear her to pieces. It wanted to watch.
Someone was looking through its eyes, controlling its every move— —until Blake flew deftly toward its head, aiming a fire extinguisher as he came, pressing its trigger, covering its eyes with thick foam. . . .
“Aaahh!” Blake’s cry was sharp, quickly stifled. The robot had swiveled as he’d passed; a radiator had come within inches of his arm; The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had exploded in flames. Frantically he turned the fire extinguisher on the book, then on himself, on his burning jacket.
The huge robot was thrown into a frenzy, writhing and slashing. It had lost its purchase, lost its view, like a beetle flipped on its back. But in seconds it would get a grip on something, tear into some fixed structure. Then surely its remote operator, forced to settle for efficient death, would ignore personal revenge and simply use the machine to smash through Star Queen’s windows.
Meanwhile the berserk and fiery robot dominated the flight deck, blocking their escape; even if it never got a good foothold it would kill them by setting them afire, melting the cabin around them.
Sparta knew what she had to do. It would leave her utterly vulnerable. The thought flashed through her brain that she couldn’t trust Blake Redfield, and instantly the rest of her brain said store it, first things first.
She fell into trance. The ultra-high frequency datastream —the frantic-smelling datastream, the hate-filled datastream of the robot’s controlling transmission—flowed into her mind. She raised her arms and hands and curved them in an antenna’s arc. Her belly burned. She beamed the message.
The robot jerked spasmodically and then froze.
She had it like a cat, by the scruff of its neck, clamped in her mind instead of her fist—but it took all her concentration to do it. She could override the strong signal from the nearby transmitter only because she was a few feet from the robot; the power stored in the batteries beneath her lungs would trickle away in less than a minute.
“Blake!” The word was plosive, hollow. “Pull the fuel capsule,” she gasped. Her beam wavered and the creature twitched violently.
Blake gaped at her. She hung like a levitating Minoan priestess in the lurid light, her arms curved into hooks, conferring a savage benediction. She forced out the words, thin as husks: “In its belly. Pull it.”
He moved at last, under it, between its wavering legs and claws. Above the paralyzed machine the ceiling was charring from the heat of the radiators; the smoldering plastic padding began pouring acrid smoke into the room.
Blake fumbled at the fuel port—she wanted to tell him what to do but she didn’t dare—and after a moment he figured it out and got the port open.
Then he was stymied again. He paused to study the fuel cell assembly for endless seconds.
He saw that it was made for safety, for simplicity. It was, after all, a Rolls-Royce. He wrapped his fingers around the chrome staples of the fuel assembly, braced his feet against the robot’s shell, and pulled.
The fuel assembly slid out. Its cladding telescoped to shield it as he withdrew it. In that instant the massive robot was gutted, dead. Its radiators cooled— —not soon enough to prevent the ceiling exploding into flames.
“Damn it, there’d better be another fire extinguisher in here,” he shouted.
There was. Sparta yanked it from its bracket, shot past him, and covered the blazing padding with creamy foam.
She emptied the bottle on it, then flung it away.
They looked at each other—keyed up, the pair of them— exasperated, singed and sooty, choking on smoke, and then he managed a grin. She forced herself to return it.
“Let’s get those suits on before we suffocate.”
He put on McNeil’s, she Wycherly’s. As she was bleeding some of Wycherly’s oxygen into McNeil’s empty tank, she paused. She’d had another inspiration.
“Blake . . . it was Sylvester who stole the book—who had it stolen. And I think I know where it is now.”
“She had a case of other books aboard, but I looked in there. . . .”
“So did I. This is a guess. Don’t hold it against me if I’m wrong.” She twisted the oversize spacesuit’s gloves and yanked them off.
“Where are you going?”
“I need my fingers for this.”
She pulled herself back to the flight deck. She moved between the claws and legs of the inert robot until she found its main processor access. She opened the port and reached inside.
Blake watched her from the ceiling, barely visible in the dark. “What are you doing in there?” She’d been at it for what seemed a long time.
“I’m going to have to reinsert the fuel assembly. Don’t worry, it’s lobotomized now.”
He said nothing. He couldn’t think of anything to say except, you must be crazy.
When the fuel assembly slid into the robot its head wobbled, its claws clashed feebly, but its movements were those of a drugged rhinoceros. Sparta, tiny inside Wych- erly’s borrowed suit, moved into the robot’s sluggish embrace again and reached into the processor. Motors whined. The robot’s abdomen split down the center and unfolded in layer upon layer of compound chambers, until the complex metal intestines of the ore-processing cavity lay exposed. In the grisly light the machine seemed to have disemboweled itself.
Sparta pulled herself over the carapace of the gutted robot and peered inside. There, propped between two massive worm gears in a mesh of tube snouts and grillwork, nestled a fragile, beautiful book, snug in its slipcase.
XIX
The lights came on first, and spacesuited teams of workers moved efficiently into the empty security sector, evacuated both of people and of air, to replace the blown pressure hatch. Within half an hour of the emergency, the core had been repressurized and business had resumed as usual.
Before that, while air was still flowing back into the Q3 lock, a patrol squad, pressure-suited and with stunguns drawn, burst into Star Queen. They were hardened cops, used to dealing with drunkenness and homicidal rage and other forms of insanity that commonly afflict the human residents of space stations, but the destruction astonished them.