‘Why not use the robots to attack?’ Mustafa asked.
‘I could, of course, but I’m offering second chances.’ That was not entirely true, because though he could use his robots, it struck him as unlikely they would prove sufficient to penetrate the Political Office. He needed soldiers, but before he could trust them he needed to assess them in action.
‘We never even had a first chance,’ grumbled Mustafa. ‘Your robots gonna leave us alone?’
‘My robots will leave you alone,’ Saul confirmed.
The three of them now headed off to Barracks One, where their men checked and loaded their weapons while Langstrom delivered the briefest of briefings Saul had ever heard: ‘Guys, we hit the cell block, let the prisoners go, and stick the guards in the cells.’
‘What if the guards resist?’ asked a tall Nordic-blonde woman.
‘I didn’t say they had to go into the cells alive, did I?’
General laughter greeted this, so it indeed seemed no love was lost.
Within minutes they set off again, propelling themselves, by wall handles, down a long corridor leading from the barracks to a point where it expanded into a tubeway, then through a large airlock, then further along the tubeway for about five hundred metres, until they reached a point where any construction of walls and ceiling ended. From there they progressed along a wide walkway, now down on their feet using their gecko boots. As they proceeded, Langstrom issued brief comments over radio, which his sergeants translated into orders.
‘Five in the admissions section, maybe six,’ observed Langstrom.
‘Peach, your guys in. I want ’em disarmed and on the floor,’ ordered Mustafa. ‘Use zip-cuffs.’
As they reached a crossroads in the walkway, Langstrom gestured right and then left. ‘We need to cover the other entrances.’
Sergeant Jack raised a fist, held up three fingers, twice, then also gestured right and then left. ‘Three minutes,’ he added. ‘Let us know when you’re in position.’
Breaking into long loping strides, twelve troops went right and twelve went left. This confirmed for Saul that the men were organized in units of four, below the sergeants. Langstrom now slowed his pace, gazing up at three robots moving through the scaffolds above.
‘They ain’t moving the same,’ remarked Jack.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Langstrom replied.
Saul was surprised but a brief analysis provided the reason: the programs that he’d put in place – almost completely displacing their previous programming – displayed his own particular coding quirks, and the robots moved more like living creatures now.
Soon the soldiers reached a point where new wall and ceiling construction extended out from the cell block.
‘Top and bottom,’ said Langstrom. ‘The four blind wings.’
Two fingers up from Jack, then a thumb stabbed up and down. Eight men detached their gecko boots from the floor, propelled themselves up on to the top surface of the tubeway and set off. A further eight men headed over one side of the walkway and began making their way across the scaffolding underneath. Saul again checked a schematic of the complex, and immediately saw what Langstrom meant. Four diverging corridors possessed only one conventional way in, and finished up against the exterior walls. However, temporary airlocks were positioned above and below each end to facilitate future installation of vertical shafts. Perhaps waiting for when further levels of cells needed to be added, which indicated the way Smith and his kind thought.
Soon they entered the tubeway into the complex, at which point he lost sight of them, since the staff inside had disconnected the cam system.
‘There’s about forty prisoners over there,’ Langstrom reported eventually. He paused for a moment. ‘Are you watching, Saul?’
‘Certainly,’ Saul replied, though it had taken him a moment to realize he could. Via the barracks, he keyed into the feed transmitted from thirty-five pincams, each fitted at the temple of every soldier and connected to their fones. Langstrom was currently pointing to a doorway above which hung a big blue sign proclaiming: ‘Adjustment’. Now another view: Peach turned out to be the big blonde and, noticing she had removed her suit helmet, Saul decided they must have already passed through an airlock in the tubeway. She and the other three of her unit were approaching Admissions, where four guards were crouching behind a makeshift barricade composed of tacked- together sheets of bubblemetal.
One propelled himself out as Peach and her men approached. ‘Good,’ he said peremptorily. ‘It’s about damned time.’
‘Time for what?’ Peach asked, still moving forward.
‘About time we were relieved,’ he continued. ‘You had no problem getting through?’
She paused beside him, while her three fellows stepped on round the barricade. Almost negligently they swung their machine pistols sideways to cover the three crouching men there.
‘Drop your weapons,’ said Peach.
‘What the—?’ The standing man’s protest ended in a coughing gurgle as he tumbled back through the air in slow motion, clutching his throat. Her karate chop had been almost too fast for the eye to follow, so Saul replayed it in his mind out of analytical interest. The remaining three were frozen in disbelief, until one of Peach’s men fired into the ceiling, and they discarded their weapons.
‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ protested one of them. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong.’ Even then, they thought this was their own people arresting them – some mistake, perhaps.
Two of Peach’s unit remained outside, gathering up weapons and securing plastic ties to wrists. The Admissions reception area contained an armourglass guard booth to one side, a long desk on the other, with storage cupboards lining the walls behind it. One man began getting up from his desk, while another behind him was already pulling a machine pistol from a rack. That’s what killed him, for as he turned, Peach did not hesitate. A
