‘Okay, good news,’ she said after a minute of plugging things in and out. ‘There’s air on the other side. We’re not going to have to swim in this stuff for much longer.’
‘How much longer?’ Nicolosi asked.
‘Can’t risk a short circuit here, guy. Gotta take things one step at a time.’
Just as she was saying that, I became aware that we were casting shadows against the wall — shadows we hadn’t been casting when we arrived. I twisted around and looked back the way we’d just swum, in the direction of the new light source I knew had to be there. Four of the squid-like machines were approaching us, dragging a blanket of newly harvested skin between them, one robot grasping each corner between two segmented silver tentacles. They were moving faster than we could swim, driven by some propulsion system jetting fluid from the sharp ends of their cone-shaped bodies.
Sollis jerked back as the outer airlock door opened suddenly.
‘I didn’t…’ she started.
‘I know,’ I said urgently. ‘The robots are coming. They must have sent a command to open the lock.’
‘Let’s get out of the way,’ Martinez said, kicking off from the wall. ‘Ingrid — get away from the lock. Take what you can, but make it snappy.’
Sollis started unplugging her equipment, stowing it on her belt with fumbling fingers. The machines powered nearer, the blanket of skin undulating between them like a flying carpet. They slowed, then halted, their lights pushing spears of harsh illumination through the fluid. They were looking at us, wondering what we were doing between them and the door. One of the machines directed its beam towards Martinez’s swimming figure, attracted by the movement. Martinez slowed and hung frozen in the glare, like a moth pinned in a beam of sunlight.
None of us said a word. My own breathing was the loudest sound in the universe, but I couldn’t make it any quieter. Silently, the airlock door closed itself again, as if the robots had detected our presence and decided to bar our exit from the flooded chamber.
One of the machines let go of its corner of the skin. It hovered by the sheet for a moment, as if weighing its options. Then it singled me out and commenced its approach. As it neared, the machine appeared far larger and more threatening than I’d expected. Its cone-shaped body was as long as me; its thickest tentacle appearing powerful enough to do serious damage even without the additional weapon of the laser. When it spread its arms wide, as if to embrace me, I had to fight not to panic and back away.
The robot started examining me. It began with my helmet, tap-tapping and scraping, shining its light through my visor. It applied twisting force, trying to disengage the helmet from the neck coupling. Whether it recognised me as a person or just a piece of unidentifiable floating debris, it appeared to think that dismantling was the best course of action. I told myself that I’d let it work at me for another few seconds, but as soon as I felt the helmet begin to loosen I’d have to act… even if that meant alerting the robot that I probably wasn’t debris.
But just when I’d decided I had to move, the robot abandoned my helmet and worked its way south. It extended a pair of tentacles under my chest armour from each side, trying to lever it away like a huge scab. Somehow I kept my nerve, daring to believe that the robot would sooner or later lose interest in me. Then it pulled away from the chest armour and started fiddling with my weapon, tap-tapping away like a spirit in a seance. It tugged on the gun, trying to unclip it. Then, as abruptly as it had started, the robot abandoned its investigation. It pulled away, gathering its tentacles into a fistlike bunch. Then it moved slowly in the direction of Nicolosi, tentacles groping ahead of it.
I willed him to stay still. There’d be no point in trying to swim away. None of us could move faster than those robots. Nicolosi must have worked that out for himself, or else he was paralysed with fright, but he made no movements as the robot cruised up to him. It slowed, the spread of its tentacles widening, and then tracked its spotlight from head to toe, as if it still couldn’t decide what Nicolosi was. Then it reached out a pair of manipulators and brushed their sharp-looking tips against his helmet. The machine probed and examined with surprising gentleness. I heard the metal-on-metal scrape through the voice link, backgrounded by Nicolosi’s rapid, sawlike breathing.
Keep it together…
The machine reached his neck, examined the interface between helmet and torso assembly and then worked its way down to his chest armour, extending a fine tentacle under the armour itself, to where the vulnerable life- support module lay concealed. Then, very slowly, it withdrew the tentacle.
The machine pulled back from Nicolosi, turning its blunt end away, apparently finished with its examination. The other three robots hovered watchfully with their prize of skin. Nicolosi sighed and eased his breathing.
‘I think…’ he whispered.
That was his big mistake. The machine righted itself, gathered its tentacles back into formation and began to approach him again, its powerful light sweeping up and down his body with renewed purpose. The second machine was nearing, clearly intent on assisting its partner in the examination of Nicolosi.
I looked at Sollis, our horrified gazes locking. ‘Can you get the door—’ I started.
‘Not a hope in hell.’
‘Nicolosi,’ I said, not bothering to whisper this time, ‘stay still and maybe they’ll go away again.’
But he wasn’t going to stay still: not this time. Even as I watched, he was hooking a hand around the plasma rifle, swinging it in front of him like a harpoon, its wide maw directed at the nearest machine.
‘No!’ Norbert shouted, his voice booming through the water like a depth charge. ‘Do not use! Not in here!’
But Nicolosi was beyond reasoned argument now. He had a weapon. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to use it.
So he did.
In one sense, it did all that he asked of it. The plasma discharge speared the robot like a sunbeam through a cloud. The robot came apart in a boiling eruption of steam and fire, jagged black pieces riding the shock wave. Then the steam — the vaporised amniotic fluid — swallowed everything, including Nicolosi and his gun. Even inside my suit, the sound hit me like a hammer blow. He fired once more, as if to make certain that he had destroyed the robot. By then the second machine was near enough to be flung back by the blast, but it quickly righted itself and continued its progress towards him.
‘More,’ Norbert said, and when I looked back towards the stack of skin sheets, I saw what he meant. Robots were arriving in ones and twos, abandoning their cutting work to investigate whatever had just happened.
‘We’re in trouble,’ I said.
The steam cloud was breaking up, revealing the floating form of Nicolosi, the ruined stump of his weapon drifting away from him. The second time he fired it, something must have gone badly wrong with the plasma rifle. I wasn’t even sure that Nicolosi was still alive.
‘I take door,’ Norbert said, drawing his Demarchist weapon. ‘You take robots.’
‘You’re going to shoot us a way out, after what just happened to Nicolosi?’ I asked.
‘No choice,’ he said as the gun unpacked itself in his hand.
Martinez pushed himself across to the big man. ‘No. Give it to me instead. I’ll take care of the door.’
‘Too dangerous,’ Norbert said.
‘Give it to me.’
Norbert hesitated, and for a moment I thought he was going to put up a fight. Then he calmly passed the Demarchist weapon to Martinez and accepted Martinez’s weapon in return, the little slug-gun vanishing into his vast gauntleted hand. Whatever respect I’d had for Norbert vanished at the same time. If he was supposed to be protecting Martinez, that was no way to go about it.
Of the three of us, only Norbert and I were carrying projectile weapons. I unclipped my second pistol and passed it to Sollis. She took it gratefully, needing little persuasion to keep her energy weapon glued to her belt. The robots were easy to kill, provided we let them get close enough for a clean shot. I didn’t doubt that the surgical cutting gear was capable of inflicting harm, but we never gave them the opportunity to touch us. Not that the machines appeared to have deliberately hostile designs on us anyway. They were still behaving as if they were investigating some shipboard malfunction that required remedial action. They might have killed us, but it would only have been because they did not understand what we were.
We didn’t have an inexhaustible supply of slugs, though, and manual reloading was not an option underwater. Just when I began to worry that we’d be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, Martinez’s voice boomed through my helmet.
