Suhkalev had slowed to flag her down a side corridor, Tasya was nowhere to be seen but the rhythmic pounding of her combat boots as she sprinted in the half darkness could still be heard. “Where’s the Chertovka gone?” demanded Katya.
“She said she was scouting ahead,” replied Suhkalev. “I wish it wasn’t quite so far ahead.” He smiled unexpectedly and then ran down the corridor too, Katya close on his heels.
They almost ploughed into Tasya coming back. “Dead… end…” she said between trying to get her breath back. “Old… mine workings. We have to… get back to the main corridor before it cuts us off.”
It was too late. The silent cigar shape of the drone was already turning the corner ahead of them. They pulled back and dog-trotted in as near silence as they could manage down a side gallery. Soon, the corridors became more and more roughly fashioned until they were moving through mine workings. The floor had been smoothed for equipment to track more easily across, but all manner of tools and debris littered the tunnels — a strange mix of mechanically excavated shafts and plasma-melted passages — making it almost impossible to move quickly and quietly. “This is hopeless,” muttered Katya, “a blind man could find us with all the noise we’re making.”
“What’s that?” Up ahead a dark shape lurked in the patchy illumination of work lights that might well have been running for the last five years. Tasya pulled a torch from her belt and revealed the shape to be some great hulking piece of mining equipment. “Well,” she said sourly, “I suppose we could hide behind that for the few milliseconds it takes the drone to vaporise it.”
“It’s a plasma cutter,” said Suhkalev slowly.
“How would you know?”
“Mining family,” he replied. “You see some of the work-related injuries miners get, and joining the Federal services looks pretty good. What I’m saying is, it’s a plasma cutter. Why’s it still here?” He walked up to it and started pressing buttons.
“Suhkalev!” gasped Katya. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He didn’t look up, but spoke as he worked. “These things cost a fortune. My father spent ages scraping together enough money to buy one with my uncle and aunts. If it had come down to a choice between leaving a cutter behind or a family member, they’d have had to think hard about it. These don’t just get dumped. If I can get this running…”
“We might be able to do to the drone what it was planning on doing to us. Best plan we’ve got. Only plan we’ve got.” The Chertovka kicked among some of the junk on the floor and picked up a handheld plasma cutter, a tiny cousin of the mining machine. “I don’t think it’ll let us get close enough to use something like this on it.” She moved to the bend in the tunnel and peered cautiously around it. “Quick as you like, Fed. It’ll be here soon.”
Katya stood beside Suhkalev and watched him punch buttons with increasing irritation while he watched a small display screen set in the cutter’s side. There seemed to be a lot of red print appearing. “How bad is it?”
“It’s a crock,” he said as he read the diagnostic report. He winced. “It might be reparable, but not in the time we have. The fusion generator’s working and the coolant system is running. It’s sucking and liquefying nitrogen out of the atmosphere right now. Stupid of me; even if the plasma torch had been working, the safety cut-outs would have prevented ignition until the coolant tanks were full. I guess we’re sunk.”
“How long to fill those tanks?” asked Tasya, who’d been listening to the bad news.
“They hold twenty litres full. They’re up to about eight litres now.”
“Eight, in the couple of minutes it’s been running? That’s impressive.” She looked at the machine, her eyes narrowing with concentration. “Is that thing mobile?”
“Too cheap a model to have a contragravitic system,” he reported as he bent to look underneath. “Just tracks.”
“Okay,” she nodded. “Anybody want to hear my stupid plan that’s going to get us all killed?”
Ninety seconds later, the drone turned the corner. Silent and implacable, it scanned the area with infrared sensors and detected human heat signatures coming from behind a piece of machinery. The focussing elements in its single eye clicked and shifted as it prepared to fire, moving a little way into the chamber to achieve maximum destructive effect.
Behind the plasma cutter, Katya, Suhkalev, and Tasya crouched, their backs braced against the machine’s metal hull. Katya hardly dared breathe, and she could see that Suhkalev was pale with terror. Only Tasya was calm, watching the drone’s advance reflected in the surface of an old metal box she had found and placed as a mirror. Katya watched her nervously, waiting for the signal. Tasya’s coolness was almost as inhuman as the thing hunting them, she thought. That they might all be dead in a few seconds did not seem to disturb or distract her in the slightest. She simply watched and waited for her moment.
Tasya gave a sudden nod and started pushing backwards, heaving the maimed plasma cutter forward on its tracks. Taken by surprise, it was a second before Katya and Suhkalev joined her, pushing as hard as they could.
The drone halted and watched this new development for the moment it took for it to decide upon a response. What that response would be was never in doubt. The lens elements clicked and rotated once more, and then the drone’s eye emitted ten megawatts of laser energy directly at the plasma cutter.
The drone was only as intelligent as it needed to be, and so it was no surprise that at no stage of its programming had anyone ever bothered to tell it what happens when a laser bolt ruptures a liquid nitrogen tank.
Katya was surprised into crying out by the sharp bang from beyond the cutter, and the battered hulk of the cutter jumped back at them as if surprised itself. Tasya was already moving, though. She’d pulled the small plasma torch she’d found from her belt and was already running out of cover. Suhkalev watched her go and then shot a look of horrified astonishment at Katya, as if to say, “She’s insane!” For her part, Katya leaned out the other way and peeked past the bulk of the mining cutter to see what was happening.
The liquid nitrogen tank had exploded, spewing first nitrogen superheated by the blast and then the liquefied gas, hundreds of degrees cooler. Katya could barely make the shape of the drone out in the billowing clouds of vapour, but she caught a momentary glimpse of the drone’s eye covered with ice where the liquid nitrogen had splashed it and frozen the moisture out of the air onto the smooth casing.
The drone was blinded and, judging by the tortured clicking and ratcheting sound coming from its eye, was unable to do much about it. It was running through its protocols, but this situation was beyond it. Until it could restore its sensors, it knew of no other options.
It certainly had no plans in place for what to do if a human with a plasma cutter was to leap astride it and, swearing fluently, cut open a small ragged hole in the drone’s hull and fire a maser bolt inside. The drone started to bob and sway erratically as a general systems failure occurred.
Katya and Suhkalev spent the first few seconds after the drone fired getting away from the damaged cutter and the pool of liquid nitrogen that was forming around it. They both knew that, if it touched them, it might not kill them but it would freeze blood solid in a second and give them an agonising case of frost bite that would take flesh cloning and surgical transplanting to repair. Having fingers or toes fall off would not be advantageous in their current situation. They got to a safe position at about the same moment the drone crashed to the floor. Tasya stood over it panting heavily with a maniacal grin on her face, her maser pistol in one hand, the handheld cutter in the other sparking evilly and under lighting her. Katya could easily see where the Chertovka label had come from.