The Departure

‘Shoot it!’ she yelled, trying to pull her own weapon out from underneath her.

‘Those attacking us would have taken all the readerguns offline, to prevent them shooting their own soldiers or, worse still,’ he glanced her way, ‘killing you.’ He pointed to the robot. ‘If this thing was back to running its usual program, we’d have been dead less than a second after it spotted us.’

Hannah now managed to get her weapon aimed at the thing, but didn’t open fire. She just stared, taking in its details and wondering how Saul managed to show so little fear. The robot’s main body was a squat upright bullet of metal painted in earthy camouflage patterns, a sensory band under clear glass encircled its circumference. The barrel of its gun protruded like a proboscis, while depending underneath its body, like a prolapsed bowel, hung its magazine and power supply.

‘It might have been reprogrammed just to capture us alive,’ he said speculatively.

She still expected him to open fire, but he abruptly lowered his weapon. The robot was now behaving very strangely, as with one sharp foot it wrote something on the mud bank. After a pause, he scrambled down the bank and waded forward to take a look. Hannah heaved herself to her feet, leg aching again, and waded after him. They both peered down at the mathematically precise letters.

‘PWRFL GOVT COMLF TRCKD U THRU ME. J.’

‘Janus?’ she gasped.

‘Are you?’ Saul asked the robot.

The spider dipped briefly in acknowledgement.

‘Powerful government comlife?’ she queried.

He glanced at her. ‘That would be something you should know more about than I do.’

‘NET UNSAFE MST EXIT’ the thing now wrote.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘DWNLD’

‘Download?’

Again that dip of acknowledgement.

‘We needed it to do so anyway, and we’ve got the right place for it,’ said Hannah shakily. That was the next stage, after the installation of further hardware in Saul’s head.

‘The secondary processor,’ he observed. Then he addressed the spider, ‘You’re fully loaded to this readergun?’

‘NO’

‘How do I download you?’

‘THRU U BUT COMLF WIL KNO LOCA’

‘I have to tell you when . . .

‘BECON’ Janus scribed in the mud, then something crackled inside the spider and, smoking, it sank down into the dyke water, jerked once and lay still.

‘Beacon?’ He looked round at Hannah.

‘Janus must have found you by following the beacon in your processor,’ she said. ‘I can only think it’s shut down now, probably by Janus, and that you’ll be able to find some way to start it running again.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, but before then we need to find a mobile surgery.’ He stepped over the now burnt-out robot and led the way on along the dyke. As she followed, Hannah’s foot kicked against something in the water, and for a moment she gazed down in horror at the skull she had brought to the surface – the thing wearing a wig of yellow silkweed. She then saw bones embedded in the dyke bank, all the way along the bank for as far as she could see.

6

The Stars Are Ours

In the late twenty-first century, as the first fusion plants came online and advanced robotics transformed global industries during the ‘Golden Decade’, it truly looked as if the world was set to make the transition away from fossil fuels with elegant ease. Russia, fooled like so many others by this idiot optimism, negotiated an alliance with the European Union and, along with North Africa, a conglomeration was formed that ultimately became Pan Europa. However, Russia, by controlling gas reserves and oilfields, still wielded a big stick, and thus came away from the negotiating table with huge concessions. In this way the massive industrial complexes and spaceports of the Pan Europan Space Agency were established at Minsk even before the Asian Coalition climbed aboard. Space missions were launched from there, thousands of satellites sent up, and it was there, too, that the dream of the colonization of Mars began to look like a reality. Meanwhile NASA, already moribund under its stifling level of bureaucracy, continued a steady decline, and the Russians, essentially, won a race that began with Sputnik’s first beep. Thirty years later people were actually living and working on the red planet, and Mars camouflage combats had become a must-have fashion item. Ten years after that, Minsk Spaceport began dying, however; sucked dry by a bureaucracy of an order of magnitude even bigger and greedier than NASA’s.

Antares Base

Var shut off communication with Ricard and focused instead on the advancing shepherd. As she saw it, she could not allow herself to fall into the Political Director’s power because, even though he had labelled her as essential, giving in to him would still lead to her certain death. They had been abandoned by Earth, and left here to die, but even so they still had energy from the fusion reactor, they had hydroponics and protein production, materials to utilize, and a hundred and sixty-two people, most of them very intelligent as well as highly skilled and motivated. Yes, they had problems over food, air and water production and usage and, yes, by killing off many personnel these could be eked out, but they would still eventually run out and those few remaining here would die. Better by far to apply all those useful minds to their present problems, since brainpower was all that could save them. Ricard had to be stopped.