He rolled again, still prone, to the center of the corridor, and froze, studying his targets. Observing no sign of continued activity from the robots, he drew a deep breath and waited for his heartbeat to return to its normal pacing. Realization suddenly struck him. Between his second and third shots, the last robot had returned fire, the bolt from its blaster sizzling the air over Hosato as he rolled across the corridor.
He shot a quick glance behind him to check his retreat route. The smoldering body of a security guard lay just inside the door.
That’s what the robot had fired at. It was reacting to the security guard’s intrusion into the corridor. Had Hosato been on his feet, he would have been caught in the line of fire, invisible or not!
He suddenly saw another blaster being poked cautiously into the corridor, a blaster held by a hand with a uniform sleeve showing.
“Hold your fire!” he called, quickly breaking the seal on his suit.
He rolled to his feet and confronted the bewildered guard who cautiously followed the blaster into the corridor.
“How did you—?” the guard began.
“How do we get into the main computer building?” Hosato demanded.
“We can’t!” the guard responded automatically.
“Look, don’t you understand?” Hosato pressured. “If we can knock out that computer, the robots will be minus a brain. That’s where they’re being controlled from.”
The guard’s face hardened. “That’s a top-security area,” he recited. “Orders state that unauthorized personnel—”
Hosato almost hit the man in his frustration but gamed control of himself.
“Where’s Sasha?” he demanded. “We’ll get your orders changed right now.”
“The chiefs been hurt,” the guard informed him. “Just before we collapsed the main tunnel, she…”
But Hosato was gone, pushing his way into the maintenance shop. Chaos reigned in the shop. There were people packed into every available space, all shouting at each other. Bits of conversation came to Hosato as he made his way through the crowd.
“it’s got to be the main programming. They couldn’t just…”
“has been in the family for two hundred years, and you just…”
“the brains God gave an ant, you’d quite poking around in the mechanics and help us figure…”
“Billy Billy Maria, have you seen…?”
“long until they burn a new corridor, we’ve got to…”
He found her at last. She was lying on the floor. James was trying to keep the crowd from stepping on her, but with limited success.
“Hosato!” the boy cried, spying him as he covered the final distance through the press of bodies. “Sasha’s—”
“I heard,” he said, dropping to one knee beside the fallen security chief. “How is she?”
It was a rhetorical question, and he ignored the boy’s answer as he took in the situation at a glance. Sasha’s right arm was gone below the elbow. There was no bleeding, probably cauterized by the same blaster bolt that took her arm, but she was in deep shock.
“Carolyn’s dead,” James shouted in Hosato’s ear.
“Who?” he replied absently.
“Carolyn. The red-headed girl in your room. When we were…”
Someone, pushed backward by the crowd, walked directly across Sasha’s body. Hosato pushed savagely at the legs, then stood up, casting about desperately. A familiar face caught his eye.
“Doc!” he called.
The maintenance man was embroiled in an argument with a red-faced couple and didn’t respond. Hosato stretched out, got hold of his arm, and physically dragged him out of the conversation.
“We’ve got an injured person down here, Doc. Is there someplace we can take her where she won’t get trampled?”
“Try the garage. Rick chased everybody out of there while he was working on the crawler.”
“Thanks!” Hosato said, releasing his hold on the mechanic.
“Say,” the man asked, “are you headed back there?”
Hosato was scanning the crowd, trying to pick a path. “Yes,” he replied absently.
“Can you take these to Rick?” the man said, forcing a wad of papers into Hosato’s hand. “Maybe he can make head or tails of them.”
“Sure,” Hosato acknowledged. “Come on, James.”
He stooped and picked Sasha up in his arms. Even with James breaking a path through the crowd, it was hard maneuvering. The door to the garage was worst of all. There were so many people in front of it Hosato had to momentarily set Sasha down and physically shove people away before he could get it open. As it was, he and James barely got Sasha through before the jostling crowd slammed the door shut behind them.
“I told you to stay out of… Oh, Hayama.” Rick emerged from under the sand crawler he was working on. “What’s… Oh, my God!”
“She’ll be okay,” Hosatc said, easing his burden to the ground. “How’s the work going?”
“Nearly complete,” Suzi pronounced, gliding into view from the far side of the crawler. “Another five minutes of uninterrupted work and the vehicle will be fully functional.”
“That’s right,” Rick confirmed. “That’s quite a 'bot you have there, Hayama. I’m going to have a whole shipload of questions for you when all this is over, but in the meantime…”
“Right,” Hosato responded. “I’ll get out of your way. Oh.” He suddenly realized he was still holding the wad of papers. “Here, Doc, said you should take a look at these.”
The mechanic took the bundle and frowned at it. “What are they?”
“I don’t know,” Hosato admitted. “Doc just said—” Their heads came around with a jerk. Muffled screams, mixed with the unmistakable sound of blaster fire, were coming from the door.
“My God,” Rick gasped'. They’re in the shop.”
“James. Get Sasha into the crawler. That one, the one that’s working. Suzi. Give him a hand.”
Hosato turned to Rick and lowered his voice. “Get this thing fired up and ready to roll. I’ll see if there’s anything we can do.”
Rick nodded and darted toward the controls of the working sand crawler, and Hosato turned toward the door.
The screams were redoubling. Unseen fists were pounding at the door to the garage. In a flash, Hosato realized what was happening. The door opened into the shop, and the panicked people were shoving against it, prevented by their own numbers from getting it open.
With a curse he ran to the door and threw his weight against it. Then he backed up and launched a flying double kick into the door.
The door didn’t budge an inch.
Hammering on the door, he tried shouting Instructions to the people on the other side. Finally he stopped, realizing the futility of his actions. Simultaneously he realized the screams from the shop were dying out, replaced by eerie silence and the sporadic sound of blasters.
He turned and sprinted for the crawler, fighting back the cold, sick feeling in his stomach.
Hanging over Rick’s shoulder, Hosato peered curiously at the piloting viewscreen as the sand crawler jolted its way across the rough terrain.
“How far is it to the Ravensteel complex?” he asked, swaying as the crawler plunged down another gully.
“Not far,” Rick assured him. “I’ve never been there myself, but I know we’re working opposite ends of the same mineral vein. I figure we should be there by morning… noon tomorrow at the latest.”
Hosato squinted skeptically at the viewscreen. “That’s pretty rough terrain out here.”
“Don’t worry. This baby’s built to run over this stuff.”
Rick’s faith in the vehicle seemed to be well-founded. It was like an exaggerated version of a tank — no, tanks had caterpillar treads, and this had huge balloon tires, eight of them, with independent suspension. More like a large version of an armored car. It was short and wide, with the rectangular crew housing perched in the center. Mounted forward of the housing was a pair of large pincer-arms as well as a small forest of lesser tool arms. The arms could be controlled from the driver’s seat with amazing dexterity and strength. The area to the rear of the housing was taken up by a small airlock that gave the operators access to the outside, should the work require the human touch. It was an impressive machine, but it was still a machine.