Only Superhuman (11 page)

So far, they hadn’t been attacked; perhaps the Michani’s blind faith in their predestined triumph kept them from watching the skies too closely. But the team still had to make the landing in one piece—well, one piece each. The stroid was approaching awfully fast, a spaceborne mountain bearing down on them. They’d only been able to match velocities so much, without being free to use thrusters on approach. And they had to get as close as possible before decelerating, to preserve the element of surprise and to maximize the efficacy of their opening salvo. Emry felt the tug on her tether that signaled her to ramp up her suit generator to full power and jettison her cooling filament. Moments later, she and three others fed their power into Tin Lizzy’s symbot at the center of their formation. The symbot sucked in all it could and then unleashed it toward the stroid as a massive microwave pulse.

Emry bit her lip and hoped the plan would work. The completed auxons were EMP-hardened, but Juan’s intelligence suggested that incomplete ones, or ones that had their innards exposed in the process of expelling duplicate parts, would be vulnerable to the pulse. The hope was that with no attack anticipated, and with the Michani eager to replicate the things as fast as possible, most of the complete ones would be in mid-replication and sufficiently opened up to be vulnerable. And it was a statistical cinch that roughly half the auxons on that stroid would be works in progress.

Sure enough, she could see many of the auxons convulsing and shutting down. But there was no time to estimate the exact number of kills. “Reel out!” Lizzy called, even as she disengaged from the tethers and fired her thrusters to decelerate for impact. At the same moment she cut loose on the stroid with a railgun, as much for a bit of extra decel as to kill auxons (and hopefully not Michani, Emry thought—though Elise herself was closer to Cowboy’s school of thought when it came to the morality of lethal force). Meanwhile, the rest of the Troubleshooters thrust backward and radially outward, the tethers reeling out between them. Emry strove for calm as the carbonaceous mountain hurtled closer, trusting that she could reel out far enough not to slam into it headlong.

Indeed, she and the others cleared the stroid by a comfortable margin, but the
X
of tethers holding them together struck it at high velocity, slicing through a couple of dozen more auxons and digging deep into the regolith. The impact shock was enough to knock a number of auxons off the surface, leaving them flailing in mid-vacuum (or mid–dust cloud as much of the regolith went with them, hopefully obscuring their sensors). Emry flew past the stroid and felt a centripetal yank as her tether began to wrap around it. She spiraled in toward the surface, the cable still reeling out, and she aimed for a shallow impact to minimize the force of it.

But suddenly she felt the tether go slack. Either it had broken or an auxon had cut it. Instantly she hit the disengage and thrust sideways so the tether would miss her rather than slicing her suit open. But her HUD pointed out what she’d intuited anyway: that her trajectory hadn’t curved enough to make stroidfall. She was headed past it, out into space, at high speed. And she had no more tether to fire at it.

Then she spotted thruster emissions—a fellow ’Shooter, swinging around from the other side! She thrust toward them, aiming her commlaser. “Catch me! I’m loose!” The other ’Shooter changed vectors toward her, but she could tell it would be too little, too late. She would pass too far beneath the other. Her only chance was to catch their tether—but how could she spot anything so slender in this vast, dark expanse? She made her best guess where it would be and swept her commlaser over the area on wide-beam visible, hoping to spot some wispy strand of reflected light. But nanotubes absorbed light too damn well.

Then something kicked her in the ass.

Actually it was a series of impacts in quick succession. The suit’s armor absorbed most of the force, but it still
hurt,
and it knocked her into a backspin around her center of mass. She instantly adjusted her thrust vectors to keep pushing her stroidward, even as she realized that the shot had come from the figure she’d called to for help. Was it really a Michani? Just as she flipped over to face the figure, it fired a second volley of shots that took her right in her breastplate. Then a third volley hit the ribbed armor over her midriff, knocking the wind out of her and, she realized, pushing her farther toward the stroid. Only one person she knew had the marksmanship and the attitude to save her life in such a crass and bellicose fashion. “Cowboy!” she snarled. He must be hitting her with high-impact kinetic slugs from his railgun.

But before she could get anything else out, she slammed tail-first into the regolith. Fortunately it was a loose agglomeration of dust and debris; she made a big splash and ended up mostly buried, her momentum quite effectively canceled. Coughing and shrieking, she struggled to dig herself out.

“Y’all okay, darlin’?”
came that infuriating fake drawl.

“Better’n you’ll be when I get my vackin’ hands on you, you son of a bitch!”

Through the dust, she saw Bhattacharyya come down a few hundred meters away, landing almost gently. He’d managed to shed a lot of his momentum by shooting her.
“Easy there, Greenie. I reckon you’re owing me now. Y’all can thank me proper after the mission.”

In your dreams,
she thought.
Shooting me in the ass is the closest you’re getting to my pants.
“How about I just don’t rip your balls off for calling me ‘Greenie’?”

“How ’bout y’all look behind ya?”

Aww, hell.
She used her thrusters to spin around. Two auxons were heading right for her—ugly things, blocky and modular, made out of a few recurring component types that were small enough to be built inside their core sections and pieced together. They had flat backs, the platforms on which their offspring were assembled until ready to be unleashed. The closer one had nothing on its back, but the latter had a duplicate half-assembled atop it. The duplicate was inert, but the parent unit must not have had its innards exposed when the microwave pulse hit.

Emry glanced over the heavy armor and razor-sharp claws of the car-sized auxons and decided this was not a hand-to-hand situation. With a sigh, she hefted the high-power firearm she’d been assigned for this mission and began firing, thrusting forward to cancel the recoil.
Goddess, I hate these things.
But her aim was true and the explosive bullets smashed through the auxons’ armor quite effectively. She made sure to focus her aim on the core sections to cripple their self-replication ability.

After that it was just point and shoot for a while. Emry didn’t have the more complicated job on this mission; that fell to Juan and Kari, whose task was to capture the Michani and access their control network to shut down the auxons. Emry and the rest were just muscle. But the auxons kept things interesting by firing back. Their armaments were clever and nasty, firing nanotube-based projectiles which could be readily resupplied by their internal weavers. Their main guns shot out madly whirling nanobolas, which could slice through nearly anything. The torso armor protected her vital organs, but it was open-sided for freedom of movement; her flanks and limbs were covered only by the light-armor tightsuit that hugged her skin. It had no air to lose except in the helmet, but too many cuts could loosen the mechanical compression that kept her body pressurized. Emry had a close call with a razor grenade: a sphere of electrically charged nanotubes, its mutual repulsion against itself forcing it to expand outward, building enormous tension until it snapped at predesigned weak spots, causing hundreds of taut monofilament strands to fly outward at deadly speed. She had to duck and cover to protect her visor from the nanotube shrapnel, but sustained deep cuts across her left arm and hip, some of them slicing clear through the tightsuit to the flesh beneath. Her repair systems acted efficiently to minimize blood loss, so she allowed herself to hope that no stray nanotubes had been left in her body to poison her cybernetic or biological systems.

One auxon came in close and grabbed her leg with its pincers—luckily around the armored boot instead of higher up, or she might’ve lost half a leg. Twisting sideways and back, she thrust out her fingers, sent a command to the glove to stiffen, and rammed it into the joint between two of the pincer arm’s modules. Her hand knifed through and she tore at whatever she could find until the pincer fell limp. Other deadly grippers flailed toward her, but she twisted away, repeated the stabbing maneuver with one of the seams on the underside, fired several explosive rounds into the gap, and pushed free as the auxon suffered terminal heartburn.

As the battle went on, Emry realized the auxons were dying rather easily. Their nanotube-based weapons may have been easy to replenish, but were also their Achilles heel; damaging their innards caused stray nanotubes to get into their electronics and short them out. Emry was beginning to understand why such weapons weren’t used more often. Again, she thanked the Goddess for shortchanging the Michani in the brain department.
Just imagine if someone
really
competent had tried this.

At last she made it to the other side of the stroid, where the Michani’s main staging area had been. “Had been” was the right tense, since the tether impact had torn into it badly, as Tin Lizzy’s weapons had no doubt done a few seconds later. Fragments of auxons drifted all over. Emry looked around through the half-settled dust to see Lizzy and Cowboy finishing off a few remaining auxons, but there didn’t seem to be any left for her to play with. And it looked like Kari and Juan had the Michani well in hand. There were four of them—gaunt, shiny-carapaced bipeds without pressure suits, originally human but having replaced as much of their bodies as possible with robotic parts in pursuit of “technotheosis,” the transcending of the flesh to achieve the divinity of AI. The idea fell flat considering that they couldn’t replace their very human brains, but they tended to gloss over that, giving an indication of just how poorly those brains were working. And their shiny new bodies, as tricked-up as they were, hadn’t helped them much against the cream of the Troubleshooter Corps. They were all bound, a few with missing limbs or torso damage, but all alive and reparable. Juan had one of his hands sticking into the back of a Michani’s head, morphed into an interface jack. The other hand was in tool mode, manipulating the innards of some kind of mainframe. Jackknife was the only person Emry knew who wore a short-sleeved space suit. “Looks like I missed the good part,” Emry broadcast. “You get the shutdown codes?”

“They didn’t have one,”
Kari replied.
“Jackknife’s DLing their data, but we’re having to finish them off the old-fashioned way.”

“Seems like they were counting on divine providence,”
Juan told her, his tone mocking.
“This is their destined triumph, after all, so of
course
their holy host wouldn’t turn on them.”

“Traitor,”
one of the Michani cried in a blatantly synthed voice.
“You could have been one of us. You understand the divine gift of the machine, you’ve already cast aside half your vulgar flesh—so how could you stand with these animals and oppose the perfecting of the universe?”

Emry saw Juan’s head turn in her direction.
“Blaze, I’m too tired to think of a witty comeback, and I don’t really care enough about these psycho morons to try. You got anything?”

“Maybe a good sock in the face, if I thought they’d feel it. Hey, is that my job around here, the comic relief?”

“Well, it shore was funny the way she landed,”
Bhattacharyya told the others.
“Her tether broke, and I had to—”

“Not another word, cactus-face!”

“She’s right,”
Kari said.
“Let’s can the chatter and get this scene secured.”
Emry felt grateful to her friend … until Kari added,
“Then you can tell us
all
about it while we wait for the ships to get here.”

But suddenly Cowboy swung a rifle at Emry and fired, too fast for her to react. For a split second she wondered if he was retaliating for her insult. But the shot had gone over her shoulder, and something spattered her helmet from behind. She thrust herself around … and there behind her floated a fifth Michani, a hole blown in its ceramic skull, with a red cloud expanding around it. Its (his? her?) limbs jerked sporadically as it drifted slowly backward and down in the stroid’s faint gravity.

Emry’s stomach convulsed; it was fortunate she hadn’t eaten in hours. Swallowing her bile, she spun back to face Bhattacharyya.
“Sorry, darlin’,”
he said in a cavalier tone.
“Only shot I could take with you in the way. Another second, that woulda been you. Looks like that’s two you’re owin’ me.”

“You could’ve warned me! I could’ve taken him!”

“Wasn’t about to be takin’ the chance, sweetheart. Your life’s worth more’n his, far as I’m concerned.”

That silenced Emry, but brought her no comfort. It was faint praise, considering how little he seemed to care about the life he’d just ended.

*   *   *

They had to wait a while for their pickup. Spaceships traveling fast enough to reach the Trojans couldn’t just stop and turn around. Juan’s
Dulcinea
and Kari’s
Nausicaa
had set out last week on a course that would intersect the Michani’s stroid nineteen hours after the battle, to serve either as pickup or backup as needed. Docked together, they had room for the five Troubleshooters plus their prisoners, who were confined in the holding cells on the ships’ “basement” levels. Luckily this part of the L5 Trojans was currently only three AU and change from Ceres; with plasma drives thrusting at over half a gee most of the way and the Ceres drive beam catching them, it would take roughly a week to get back to Demetria, not long enough to put a strain on the ships’ resources—although it was fortunate that the four Michani needed little food, air, or water.