A Circus of Hells df-2 Read online

  They hopped from behind boulders and ice banks, twenty or more, soaring toward him. Some thirty centimeters long, they had ten claw-footed legs each, a tail ending in twin spikes, a head on which half a dozen antennae moved. Mimir’s light shimmered purple off their intricately armored bodies.

  For a second Flandry seriously wondered if he had lost his mind. The old records said Wayland was barren, always had been, always would be. He had expected nothing else. Life simply did not evolve where cold was this deep and permanent, air this tenuous, metal this dominant, background radiation this high. And supposing a strange version of it could, Mimir was a young star, that had coalesced with its planets only a few hundred megayears ago from a nebula enriched in heavy atoms by earlier stellar generations; the system hadn’t yet finished condensing, as witness the haze around the sun and the rate of giant meteorite impacts; there had not been time for life to start.

  Thus Flandry’s thought flashed. It ended when the shapes were murderously upon him.

  Two landed on his helmet. He heard the clicks, felt the astonishing impact. Looking down, he saw others at his waist, clinging to his legs, swarming around his boots. Jaws champed, claws dug. They found the joints in his armor and went to work.

  No living thing smaller than a Llynathawrian elephant wolf should have been able to make an impression on the alloys and plastics that encased Flandry. He saw shavings peel off and fall like sparks of glitter.

  He saw water vapor puff white from the first pinhole by his left ankle. The creature that made it gnawed industriously on.

  Flandry yelled an obscenity. He shook one loose and managed to kick it. The shock of striking that mass hurt his toes. The bug didn’t arc far, nor was it injured. It sprang back to the fray. Flandry was trying to pluck another off. It clung too strongly for him.

  He drew his blaster, set it to needle beam and low intensity, laid the muzzle against the carapace, and pulled the trigger.

  The creature did not smoke or explode or do whatever else a normal organism would. But after two or three seconds it let go, dropped to the ground and lay inert.

  The rest continued their senseless, furious attack. Flandry cooked them off him and slew those that hadn’t reached him with a series of energy bolts. No organism that size, that powerful, that heavily shelled, ought to have been that vulnerable to his brief, frugal beams.

  The last two were on his back where he couldn’t see them. He widened the blaster muzzle and fanned across the air renewal unit. They dropped off him. The heat skyrocketed the temperature in his suit and drove gas faster out of the several leaks. Flandry’s eardrums popped painfully. His head roared and whirled.

  Training paid off. Scarcely aware of what he did, he slapped sealpatches on the holes and bled the reserve tank for a fresh atmosphere. Only then did he sit down, gasp, shudder, and finally wet his mummy-dry mouth from the water tube.

  Afterward he was able to examine the dead bugs. Throwing a couple of them into his pack, he resumed climbing. From the top of the ringwall he discerned the wrecked flyer and slanted across talus and ice patches to reach it. The crash had pretty well fractured it to bits, which facilitated study. He collected a few specimen parts and returned to Jake.

  The trip was made in a growingly grim silence, which he scarcely broke when he re-entered the boat. Aloneness and not knowing had ground Djana down. She sped to welcome him. He gave her a perfunctory kiss, demanded food and a large pot of coffee, and brushed past her on his way to the workshop.

  Chapter VII

  They had about 200 kilometers to go. That was the distance, according to the maps Flandry had made in orbit, from the scoutboat’s resting place to a peak so high that a transmission from it would be line-of-sight with some of the towering radio transceiver masts he had observed at varying separations from the old computer centrum.

  “We don’t want to get closer than we must,” he explained to the girl. “We want plenty of room for running, if we find out that operations have been taken over by something that eats people.”

  She swallowed. “Where could we run to?”

  “That’s a good question. But I won’t lie down and die gracefully. I’m far too cowardly for that.”

  She didn’t respond to his smile. He hoped she hadn’t taken his remark literally, even though it contained a fair amount of truth.

  The trip could be shortened by crossing two intervening maria. Flandry refused. “I prefer to skulk,” he said, laving out a circuitous path through foothills and a mountain range that offered hiding places. While it would often make the going tough, and Djana was inexperienced and not in training, and they would be burdened with Ammon’s supplies and planetside gear, he hoped they could average thirty or forty kilometers per twenty-four hours. A pitiful few factors worked in their favor. There was the mild gravity and the absence of rivers to ford and brush to struggle through. There was the probably steady weather. Since Wayland always turned the same face to Regin, there was continuous daylight for the span of their journey, except at high noon when the planet would eclipse Mimir. There was an ample supply of stimulants. And, Flandry reflected, it helps to travel scared.

  He decreed a final decent meal before departure, and music and lovemaking and a good sleep while the boat’s sensors kept watch. The party fell rather flat; Djana was too conscious that this might be the last time. Flandry made no reproaches. He did dismiss any vague ideas he might have entertained about trying for a long-term liaison with her.

  They loaded up and marched. More accurately, they scrambled, across the crater wall and into a stretch of sharp hills and wind-polished slippery glaciers. Flandry allowed ten minutes rest per hour. He spent most of those periods with map, gyrocompass, and sextant, making sure they were still headed right. When Djana declared she could do no more, he said calculatedly, “Yes, I understand; you’re no use off your back.” She spat her rage and jumped to her feet.

  I mustn’t drive her too hard, Flandry realized. Gradual strengthening will get us where we’re going faster. In fact, without that she might not make it at all.

  Does that matter?

  Yes, it does, I can’t abandon her.

  Why not? She’d do the same for me.

  Um-m-m…I don’t know exactly why…let’s say that in spite of everything, she’s a woman. Waste not, want not.

  When she did begin reeling as she walked, he agreed to pitch camp and did most of the chores alone.

  First he selected a spot beneath an overhanging cliff. “So our winged chums won’t see us,” he explained chattily, “or drop on us their equivalent of what winged chums usually drop. You will note, however, that an easy route will take us onto the top of the cliff, if we should have groundborne callers. From there we can shoot, throw rocks, and otherwise hint to them that they’re not especially welcome.” Slumped in exhaustion against a boulder, she paid him no heed.

  He inflated the insulating floor of the sealtent and erected its framework. The wind gave him trouble, flapping the fabric he stretched across until he got it secured. Because the temperature had risen to about minus fifty, he didn’t bother with extra layers, but merely filled the cells of the one skin with air.

  To save accumulator charge, he worked the pump by hand, and likewise when it evacuated the tent’s interior. Extreme decompression wasn’t needed, since the Waylander atmosphere was mostly noble gases and nitrogen. The portable air renewer he had placed inside, together with a glower for heat, took care of remaining poisonous vapors and excess carbon dioxide, once he had refilled the tent with oxygen at 200 millibars. (The equipment for all this was heavy. But it was indispensable, at least until Djana got into such condition that she didn’t frequently need the relief of shirtsleeve environment. And she’d better! Given the limitations of what they could carry, they could make possibly fifteen stops that utilized it.) While renewer and glower did their work, Flandry chipped water ice to melt for drinking and cooking.

  They entered through the plastic airlock. He showed Djana how
to bleed her spacesuit down to ambient pressure. When they had taken off their armor, she lay on the floor and watched him with eyes glazed by fatigue. He fitted together his still, put it on the glower, and filled it with ice. “Why are you doing that?’ she whispered.

  “Might have unpleasant ingredients,” he answered. “Gases like ammonia come off first and are taken up by the activated colloids in this bottle. We can’t let them contaminate our air; our one renewer’s busy handling the stuff we breathe out; and besides, when we strike camp I must pump as big a fraction as I can manage back into its tank. When the water starts boiling, I shut the valve to the gas-impurity flask and open the one to the water can. We can’t risk heavy metal salts, especially on a world where they must be plentiful. Doesn’t take but a micro quantity of plutonium, say, this far from medical help, to kill you in quite a nasty fashion. A propos, I suppose you know we daren’t smoke in a pure oxy atmosphere.”

  She shuddered and turned her glance from the desolation in the ports.

  Dinner revived her somewhat. Afterward she sat hugging her legs, chin on knees, and watched him clean the utensils. In the cramped space, his movements were economical. “You were right,” she said gravely. “I wouldn’t have a prayer without you.”

  “A hot meal, albeit freeze-dried, does beat pushing a concentrate bar through your chowlock and calling it lunch, eh?”

  “You know what I mean, Nicky. What can I do?”

  “You can take your turn watching for monsters,” he said immediately.

  She winced. “Do you really think—”

  “No. I don’t think. Too few data thus far to make it worth the trouble. Unhappily, though, one datum is the presence of two or more kinds of critter whose manners are as deplorable as they are inexplicable.”

  “But they’re machines!”

  “Are they?”

  She stared at him from under tangled tawny bangs. He said while he labored: “Where does ‘robot’ leave off and ‘organism’ begin? For hundreds of years there’ve been sensor-computer-effector systems more intricate and versatile than some kinds of organic life. They function, perceive, ingest, have means to repair damage and to be reproduced; they homeostatize, if that horrible word is the one I want; certain of them think. None of it works identically with the systems evolved by organic animals and sophonts—but it works, and toward very similar ends.

  “Those bugs that attacked me have metal exoskeletons underneath that purple enamel, and electronic insides. That’s why they succumbed so easily to my blaster: high heat conductivity, raising the temperature of components designed for Wayland’s natural conditions. But they’re machinery as elaborate as any I’ve ever ruined. As I told you, I hadn’t the time or means to do a proper job of dissection. As near as I could tell, though, they run off accumulators. Their feelers are magnificently precise sensors—magnetic, electric, radionic, thermal, et cetera. They have optical and audio systems as well. In fact, with one exception, they’re such gorgeous engineering that it’s a semantic quibble whether to call them robots or artificial animals.

  “Same thing, essentially, for the flyers—which, by the way, I’m tempted to call snapdragonflies. They get their lift from the wings and a VTOL turbojet; they use beak and claws to rip rather than grind metal; but they have sensors and computers akin to the bugs’. And they seem able to act more independently, as you’d expect with a larger ‘brain.’ ”

  He put away the last dish, settled back, and longed for a cigarette. “What do you mean by ‘one exception’?” Djana asked.

  “I can imagine a robotic ecology, based on self-reproducing solar-cell units that’d perform the equivalent of photosynthesis,” Flandry said. “I seem to recall it was actually experimented with once. But these things we’ve met don’t have anything I can identify as being for nourishment, repair, or reproduction. No doubt they have someplace to go for replacement parts and energy recharges—someplace where new ones are also manufactured—most likely the centrum area. But what about the wrecked ones? There doesn’t seem to be any interest in reclaiming those marvelous parts, or even the metal. It’s not an ecology, then; it’s open-ended. Those machines have no purpose except destruction.”

  He drew breath. “In spite of which,” he said, “I don’t believe they’re meant for guarding this world or any such job. Because who save a lunatic would build a fighting robot and omit guns?

  “Somehow, Djana, Wayland’s come down with a plague of monsters. Until we know how many of what kinds, I suggest we proceed on the assumption that everything we meet will want to do us in.”

  A few times in the course of the next several Terran days, the humans concealed themselves when shapes passed by. These might be flyers cruising far overhead, in one case stooping on some prey hidden by a ridge. Or a pair of dog-sized, huge-jawed, sensor-bristling hunters loped six-legged on a quest; or a bigger object, vhorned and spike-tailed, rumbled on caterpillar treads along the bottom of a ravine. Twice Flandry lay prone and watched combats: bugs swarming over a walking red globe with lobsterish claws; a constrictor shape entangled with a mobile battering ram. Both end results appeared to confirm his deductions. The vanquished were left where they fell while the victors resumed prowling. Remnants from earlier battles indicated the same aftermath. Otherwise the journey was nothing but a struggle to make distance. There was little opportunity while afoot, little wakefulness while at rest, to think about the significance of what had been seen. Nor did Flandry worry about encountering a killer. If it happened, it happened. On the whole, he didn’t expect that kind of trouble…yet. This was too vast and rugged a land for any likelihood of it. Given due caution, he and Djana ought to make their first objective. What occurred after that might be a different story.

  He did notice that the radio traffic got steadily thicker on the nonstandard band the robots used. No surprise. He was nearing what had been the center of operations, which must still be the center of whatever the hell was going on nowadays.

  Hell indeed, he thought through the dullness of the exhaustion.

  Did somebody sabotage Wayland, maybe long ago, by installing a predator factory? Or was it perhaps an accident? People may have fought hereabouts, and I suppose a nearby explosion could derange the main computer.

  None of the guesses seemed reasonable. The beast machines couldn’t offer effective opposition to modern weapons. They threatened the lives of two marooned humans; but a single spacecraft, well-armed, well-equipped with detectors, crew alerted to the situation, could probably annihilate them with small difficulty. That fact ruled out sabotage—didn’t it? As for damage to the ultimate control engine: Imprimis, it must have had heavy shielding, plus extensive self-repair capability, the more so in view of the meteorite hazard. Secundus, assuming it did sustain permanent harm, that implied a loss of components; it would then scarcely be able to design and produce these superbly crafted gargoyles.

  Flandry gave up wondering.

  The time came when he and Djana halted within an hour of the mountaintop that was their goal. They found a cave, screened by tall pinnacles, wherein they erected the sealtent. “It’s not going any further,” the man said. “Among other reasons, you know how long it takes to raise and to knock down again; and we can’t stand many more losses of unrecovered oxygen each time we break camp. So if we don’t succeed in getting help, and in particular if we provoke a hunt for us, the burden won’t be worth carrying. This is a nice, hard-to-find, defensible spot to sit in.”

  “When do we call?” the girl asked.

  “When we’ve corked off for about twelve hours,” Flandry said. “I want to be well rested.”

  She herself was tired enough that she dropped straight into sleep.

  In the “morning” his spirits were somewhat restored. He whistled as he led the way upward, and when he stood on the peak he declaimed. “I name thee Mt. Maidens.” All the while, though, his attention ranged ahead.

  Behind and on either side was the familiar jumble of rock, ice, and inky
shadows. Above gloomed the sky, its scattered stars and clouds, Mimir’s searing brilliance now very near the dim, bright-edged shield of Regin. The wind whimpered around. He was glad to be inside his warm if smelly armor.

  Ahead, as his topographical maps had revealed, the mountain dropped with a steepness that would have been impossible under higher gravity. The horizon was flat, betokening the edge of the plain where the centrum lay, and the squares he had seen, and he knew not what else. Through binoculars he made out the cruciform tops of four radio transceiver masts. Those had risen since man abandoned Wayland; others were scattered about in the wilds; from orbit, he had identified a few as being under construction by robots of recognizable worker form. He had considered making for one of those sites instead of here, but decided against it. That kind of robot was too specialized, also in its “brain,” to understand his problem. Besides, the nearest was dangerously far from Jake’s resting place.

  He unfolded a light tripod-based directional transmitter. He plugged in the ancillary apparatus, including a jack to his own helmet radio. Squatting, he directed the assembly in its rotation until it had locked onto one of the masts. Djana waited. Her face showed still more gaunt and grimy than his, her eyes hollow and fever-bright.

  “Here goes,” Flandry said.

  “O God, have mercy, help us,” breathed in his earplugs. He wondered briefly, pityingly, if religion was what had kept her going, ever since her nightmare childhood. But he had to tell her to keep silence.

  He called on the standard band. “Two humans, shipwrecked, in need of assistance. Respond.” And again. And again. Nothing answered but the fire-crackle of cosmic energies.

  He tried on the robots’ band. The digital code chattered with no alteration that he could detect.

  He tried other frequencies.

  After an hour or more, he unplugged and rose. His muscles ached, his mouth was parched, his voice came hoarse out of a roughened throat. “No go, I’m afraid.”