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.A non–descript stretch of street that happened to contain a set of bulkhead doors — the first of two sets that needed to be closed to isolate the hole in the hull.The robot climbed up the wall to the control panel.Reaching out, it activated the panel, paused, and then pressed the button that would close the door.Its sensor pivoted to watch the door slowly slide shut.§“That was easy,” Bruce said, watching the door on his terminal.“Yeah.Huh,” Stein said.§“Why did that door just close?” Helot asked.He had been watching the area in vacuum ever since the attack.Othersiders trapped in the streets, banging on doors, clutching their throats.He had made himself watch.He was trying not to think about how little he felt.He was pretty confident he should feel a lot worse than he did.Manipulating the controls on his display, he zoomed in on the door and scanned around the nearby street, eventually spotting the answer to his question.§The maintenance robot traveled the short distance to the second bulkhead door.Lying across the plane where the door would slide shut was a body.After a few seconds of consideration, the robot cautiously moved forward, grabbing the dead soldier by the collar.Slowly the robot reversed, trying to drag the body out of the way.But as the corpse started to move, the collar gave way, torn apart by the manipulator.Another few seconds passed while the robot reevaluated the obstacle.Eventually, it backed up a short distance, reversing in a curved line until it faced the body squarely.It then charged forward, slamming into the corpse.The friction holding the body in place gave way, and the robot and body slowly slid past the door.§Helot fumed at Curts’ idiocy.He would probably know how to disable the robot remotely, if he wasn’t off in fucking space somewhere.He watched the robot and its pallbearing learning curve.Beside him, one of the security officers said, “I’ve got an idea.” Helot looked at him, vowing to learn his name the next time someone casually mentioned it.The officer moved over to a different panel and found the right set of controls.“Now, this will require some timing.”§The robot had mounted the wall beneath the control panel and slowly reached out to press the button.The bulkhead door slowly started to close.The robot retreated to the floor and backed up to watch the door slip into place.Its sensor rotated around to view the first door it had activated, just visible behind the edge of a building corner.The door had opened again.§“What?” Bruce and Stein said in unison.§The robot returned to the original door, climbed up, and shut it again, watching it close carefully.The door slid into place, and the robot climbed down, taking a minute to inspect the door’s perimeter to ensure it stayed shut.It did.The robot turned to look at the second door.§“Oh, son of a bitch!”“They’re fucking with us,” Stein said, looking at the second door, now opened again.“We should have done this the right way from the start.”§“Hehehehehehehehe,” Helot said.“Dummies.” He looked at the other people in the room, who stared back, blankly.It occurred to Helot that he was laughing at a desperate attempt to save people’s lives.His smile evaporated.Turning back to the screen, he said, “They’re going to figure it out soon.How long until your guy is ready?”“He’s ready now.”§The robot pried off the access panel underneath the controls and delicately extended its plasma cutter.With a short, sharp burst, it severed the link between the door mechanism and the controls, locking the door in the closed position.It descended the wall and made its way over to the second door for the final time.There, it climbed the wall, pried off the access panel, and exploded.An e–suit–clad figure, rifle held somewhat awkwardly at its hip, walked over and kicked the remnants of the robot.Another shot into its guts.Satisfied, the figure retreated around the corner, entering the room with the puncture.He carefully sidestepped the hole into the rest of the universe, and made his way to the temporary airlock installed in the neighboring room.§Bruce smashed the terminal on the ground.“Why is nothing easy? Why does everything have to be so fucking hard?”Stein stared at the largest piece of the terminal, which had come to rest on her foot.They had lost contact with the maintenance robot and had spent the past five minutes trying to reconnect.“I don’t get it,” she said.“They blew it up,” Bruce said, balling his hands into fists.“How?”“I don’t know.Wizard magic? But robots don’t just drop offline like that.I’ve never seen that happen.”Stein pulled out her own terminal.“So, it’s not worth sending in another robot to try again?”“What’s the point? They’d just break that, too.Besides, it’d take hours to get one into position.”Stein cocked her head at him.“Well, what else are we doing?” She stared at Bruce desperately, mainly so she didn’t have to look at Griese, whose gaze she could feel on the back of her head.A chirp from her terminal, from everyone’s terminal.She looked down to see an incoming message from Helot.A fraction of a second later, Helot’s voice erupted through the ship’s PA system.“Attention, Argos.This is Captain James Edward Helot [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]