own eyes and any (or all) of the sixteen ceiling-mounted cameras. I set off a small pyrotechnic device which sent thin streams of coloured smoke wafting at random across our entire, expanded field of view—a trick which betrays even the most sophisticated data chameleon. The cameras were clean. We were alone in the building.
A few seconds later, we both felt the floor vibrating, very slightly. We shared sensory data to get a better parallax, and P2 pinned down the source of the vibrations to one container, in the second row from the left. I was about to switch the camera above to infrared—for what little that might have revealed—when suddenly there was no need: a pale, transparent-blue plasma jet punched through the steel of one of the walls of the container, close to an upper corner, and began smoothly slicing its way down.
Vincent queried the main warehouse system, and said, ‘One Hitachi MA52 mining robot, on its way to the goldfields.’
That’s when I felt about as much of a frisson as P3 permitted. The container was fifteen metres high. I’d seen the MA52s on HV: they looked like a cross between a tank and a bulldozer, scaled up considerably, sprouting a dozen steel appendages, each of which terminated in an assortment of wicked-looking tools. The things carried out self-maintenance, which explained the plasma torch. Needless to say, any mining robot was supposed to be shipped unpowered—and, powered or not, should not have been able to wake spontaneously in transit and decide to cut itself free. At the very least, it had been completely reprogrammed, and it had probably been tampered with mechanically as well. All rules governing the behaviour of the standard model could safely be considered void; there was no point tracking down the documentation for emergency de-activation codes.
We were armed, of course. Our weapons could have melted through the robot’s outer plate, in about a decade.
I notified the station of developments, and put in a call for reinforcements. The plasma jet reached the bottom of its path, and made a neat horizontal turn.
There were six massive cranes fitted to the warehouse ceiling, one for each row of containers. By the time I’d given them a second glance, Vincent already had them under his control. The one we needed, though, was parked at the end of the building furthest from where we needed it, and it crawled along its track with unbelievable lassitude. I invoked PS’s judgement of distances and velocities, then did the same for the plasma jet’s progress; the container would be open at least fifteen seconds before we could start to raise it. But it was one row in from the edge of the grid, and the aisles were barely three metres wide—the MA52 wouldn’t have room to charge right out; it would have to clear a path first. That would buy us far more than fifteen seconds.
The rectangle of steel came free—then skidded down the aisle with a deafening screech, still balanced on its edge until it hit the far wall. As the robot, propelled by banks of manoeuvrable treads, rolled out as far as it could, the container slipped a short distance in the opposite direction. Ten or twenty centimetres, no more.
Vincent cursed softly: ‘Suboptimal!’
The crane lowered its grappling claw on to the container’s misaligned roof. Locking pins—as thick as my arm—shot out in search of target holes, retracted in surprise, then cycled idiotically through the same action four more times, before giving up. A red light on the claw started flashing, an ear-splitting siren shrieked twice, then everything on the crane shut down.
We’d kept our distance; it took me twenty seconds to reach the action—on the robot’s blind side—by which time it had started ramming the container that blocked its path. Each time it backed away, its own container slid forward slightly; each time it advanced, the opposite happened—but the net motion was backwards. The robot was going to be hemmed in for several minutes, but any prospect of aligning the grappling claw was vanishing rapidly.
Each container had a ladder welded to its side; as it happened, that was the side that had been cut away and discarded, so I climbed the container across the aisle and jumped the gap. Starting the claw swinging was much harder than I’d expected; it hung from six cables, arranged as three pairs, and the pairing complicated and damped the motion. Gradually, I built up the oscillations, until the claw was sweeping far enough to compensate for the container’s displacement.
Now it was just a matter of timing.
There was no need for me to cue Vincent; the closest ceiling camera gave him a perfect view. P5 had no trouble extrapolating the motion of the swinging claw, but the lurching of the container was unpredictable. The crane’s firmware didn’t make things any easier—each time Vincent commanded it to try to grab the container, it went through a hard-wired cycle of five attempts, and then shut down; the only freedom he had was to choose the moment he started the sequence. Three times, the container shifted, throwing out all his calculations. The fourth time, I knew it was our last chance. I could make the claw swing further horizontally, but the arc of its motion would lift it too high for the locking pins to engage.
When it happened, it looked as miraculous, as improbable, as something from a time-reversed movie: everything magically fitting together, like the fragments of a broken vase. Everything except
I kicked it as hard as I could. It slipped into place. Primed or not, I felt a moment of dizzy jubilation. I ducked between the cables and jumped back across the aisle as the crane’s lifting motors burst noisily into life. Then I clambered down the ladder and ran.
The container rose smoothly; the MA52, still two-thirds inside, had no choice but to rise with it. As its treads approached the height of the roof of the container which had blocked its way, I could almost imagine it making a leap for freedom—but the gap was too wide. The robot ascended helplessly to the ceiling, fifty metres above.
I could hear sirens approaching; our reinforcements were about to arrive. I met up with Vincent at the warehouse entrance.
I said, ‘Now we wait for the army to come and blast the fucker into shrapnel.’ Vincent shook his head. ‘No need.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The safety features of this system,’ he said, ‘leave a lot to be desired.’ He dropped it.
Later, weapons were found in the debris which could have demolished a suburb or two—and it was only the Children’s incompetence which had kept that from happening: it turned out that they’d corrupted the security system of the wrong warehouse. If there’d been no early warning, the whole thing would have ended with the army having to take on the MA52 in the streets. In three African cities, that was exactly what had happened, with heavy loss of life. Elsewhere, of course, there’d been the usual bombings: everything from incendiary devices to chemical shells spreading neurotoxins. I didn’t want to know about it; I glanced at the headlines then flipped screens, unwilling to swallow so soon the truth of how microscopic our victory had been.
Despite having been merely lucky, Vincent and I were, predictably, portrayed as heroes. I didn’t mind—it meant that I was now virtually guaranteed promotion to the counter-terrorist unit. The media attention was tiresome, but I gritted my teeth and waited for it to pass. Karen resented the whole thing, and I couldn’t blame her; none of our friends seemed to want to talk about anything else, and she must have been as sick of hearing the story as I was of telling it.
Still worse, Karen’s well-meaning brother dropped in one Sunday afternoon with recordings of every interview I’d given—primed, as the Department insisted—which we’d taken great pains to avoid when they’d been broadcast. We had to sit through them all. Karen loathed seeing me primed, almost as much as I did myself. ‘The zombie boy scout’ she called me, and I couldn’t disagree; the cop with my face on the HV was so bland, so earnest, so blinkered, so fucking
Every cop has no less than six standard ‘priming mods’, PI to P6, but it’s P3 which imposes the mental state appropriate for active duty, it’s P3 which really makes you
