overhead gave him momentary pause.
A glance up through the foliage revealed that he’d been none too hasty in executing his task.
The jump team had arrived and was descending from the darkness.
FOUR
Clearing the perimeter fence by a hundred meters, Manuel dropped his gear bag on a tether and continued his descent into the compound. He was aware of his teammates floating in behind him, aware of the ground rushing up.
Now he pulled his left toggle to turn into the slight westerly wind, trimmed more altitude, waited until he felt the bag land below him with a thump, and hit the quick-release snap to disengage it. An instant later, he drew both toggles evenly down to his waist to flare the chute. It collapsed in on itself, spilling air.
He landed softly on the balls of his feet.
His chin low to his chest, Manuel let himself move forward in a kind of loose-legged trot, remaining upright, checking his momentum as he separated himself from the canopy. The others, meanwhile, had come rustling to the ground on either side of him. Most of them were also on their feet, but one or two had dropped a little harder, tumbling onto their backs and sides in fluid parachute landing falls.
And then they were up and slipping free of their harnesses. They hurried to recover their bags and collect the equipment inside them — grenades, plastic explosive charges, and upgraded FAMAS rifles like those that would be used by the extraction team. Exchanging their jump helmets and goggles for combat helmets with optical display units, they donned dark special-purpose visors, coupled the electronic gunsights on their rifles to the helmet- mounted displays, lowered their monocular eyepieces, and then stealthily moved out at their leader’s command, splitting into three groups of four.
If the information they had obtained was correct, it would only be seconds, at most minutes, before their presence was detected.
Along with other things of vital interest to their employer, that information would be well tested as the night ran its course.
The employees at the facility mostly called them “hedgehogs.”
Rollie Thibodeau, who headed the night security detail, preferred the term “li’l bastards,” grumbling that the way they responded to certain situations resembled human behavior a bit too closely for comfort. But Rollie was technophobic to an extreme degree, and being a Louisiana Cajun, felt an inborn obligation to be both voluble and contrary.
Still, when he was in a generous mood, he would acknowledge their value by adding that they were
In fact, the mobile security robots weren’t very bright at all, possessing the approximate intelligence of the beetles and other insects that hedgehogs of the living, mammalian variety preferred to dine upon. And while they could function as surrogates for human beings in performing a host of physical tasks, scientific experts of an Asimovean bent would have contended it was improper, or at the very least imprecise, to even define them as robots, since they were incapable of autonomous thought and action, slaved to remote computers, and ultimately monitored and controlled by human guards.
True robots, these experts might assert, would have the ability to make independent decisions and act upon them without any help from their creators, and were perhaps twenty or thirty years from actual development. What existed now, and what laymen wrongly considered to be robots, were actually robot
These conflicting definitions aside, the hedgehogs were versatile, sophisticated gadgets that had been put to effective use patrolling the four-thousand-acre ISS manufacturing compound in Mato Grosso do Sul. Through a rather complicated agreement with the Brazilian government and a half-dozen other countries involved in the space station’s construction, UpLink International had managed to win administrative and managerial control of the plant, simultaneously assuming blanket responsibility for its protection — something the Brazilian negotiators had been finagled into thinking was an expensive concession on UpLink’s part, but which had actually pleased Roger Gordian and his security chief, Pete Nimec, to no end. If their experience operating in transitional and politically unstable nations had taught them anything, it was that nobody could look out for them as well as they could look out for themselves.
The hedgehogs unarguably made looking out for themselves easier. “R2D2 on steroids” is how Thibodeau described them, and in its own way that was an apt representation. Their omnidirectional color video cameras were encased in rounded turrets atop vertical racks or “necks,” giving them a vaguely anthropomorphic appearance that many female staffers found cute — as did quite a few of the plant’s male employees, though rarely by open admission. Mounted on tracked 6x6 drive platforms, they were quick, quiet, and capable of maneuvering across everything from narrow corridors and stairwells to rugged, heavily obstacled outdoor terrain. Products of UpLink’s own R&D, they boasted a wide range of proprietary hardware-and-software-based systems. Their hazard/intruder detection array included broad-spectrum gas, smoke, temperature, optical flame, microwave radar, vehicular sonar, passive infrared, seismic, and ambient light sensors. Their clawed, retractable gripper arms were strong enough to lift twenty-five-pound objects and precise enough to pick the smallest coins up off the ground.
Nor were the hedgehogs limited to merely sounding the alarm should they find something amiss. They were, rather, midnight riders and first-wave militia rolled into one, ready to neutralize threats ranging from chemical fires to trespassers on command. Packed aboard their chassis were fluid cannons that could unleash highpressure jets of water, polymer superglues, and anti-traction superlubricants; 12-gauge sidewinder shotguns loaded with disabling aerosol cartridges; laser-dazzler and visual stimulus and illusion banks; and other fruits of UpLink’s ambitious nonlethal weapons program.
There were a total of six hedgehogs at the Brazilian compound, four posted near the borders of its approximately rectangular grounds, an additional pair safeguarding its central buildings. Each of the ground patrols encompassed an entire perimeter line and a parallel sector reaching inward for one hundred meters, and each mechanical sentry on that beat had been given a nickname whose first initial corresponded with the first letter of the direction it covered: Ned toured the northern perimeter, Sammy the compound’s south side, Ed its eastern margin, Wally its western. The two indoor sentries were Felix and Oscar, assigned to the factory and office complexes respectively. On average, a hedgehog would patrol for eight to ten hours at a stretch before having to recharge its nickel-cadmium batteries at one of the docking stations along its route, with more frequent pauses in the event of an increased task load.
And so they went about their rounds, smooth-running and tireless, responding to an anomalous motion here, an unusual variation in temperature there, investigating whatever seemed not to belong, relaying a stream of environmental data to monitoring stations attended by their human supervisors, and alerting them to any sign of danger or unauthorized entry along the fenced-in margins of the compound.
An invasion from above, however, was another matter altogether.
The hedgehog was midway through its third tour of the facility’s western quadrant when its infrared sensors picked up a wavelength reading of twelve to fourteen microns — the distinctive heat signature of a human being — some fifty yards in front of it.
The robot paused, tracking the emission source, but it had quickly backed out of sensor range.
Its computers triangulating the object’s line of movement to project its likely path of retreat, the hedgehog gave chase, slinging across the rocky soil on its all-terrain carrier.
Suddenly another source of human IR emissions appeared, this one behind the hedgehog.
Then a third on its right, and a fourth on the left.
The robot stopped again, boxed in. Its various turret sensors needed just an instant to perform a sweep extending for fifty meters in a full circle. At the same time, its infrared illuminator was casting a light field that
