“Braking thrust routine armed… initiating… now.” This time, every thruster oriented toward the Russian station went off in a sustained, maximum-power burn. He felt himself slammed forward, deeper into the robot’s cushioning haptic interface. His eyes closed involuntarily.
The thrusters shut down.
“Braking maneuver complete,” the COMS reported coolly. “Range to target four feet. Relative velocity is zero. Fuel reserves at thirty-two percent.”
Brad opened his eyes to find himself floating serenely within arm’s length of the space station’s outer hull. “Jesus,” he said unsteadily. “Is everyone all right?”
“A bit shaken, but not stirred,” Vasey replied.
“Wolf Two is in position and undamaged,” Nadia said crisply. “Cub Three is in reserve one hundred feet below the aft module.”
Brad looked along the curved surface of the central Mars One module, noting several communications and sensor antennas of differing sizes and shapes. Similar antennas festooned the forward and aft modules. “Then let’s go! First, we make these guys blind and deaf. Understood?”
“Affirmative, Wolf One,” both Nadia and Vasey said.
He activated a couple of thrusters and drifted toward the nearest antenna, judged by his computer to be the station’s primary radio link. When he got closer, he grabbed its mast with one of the robot’s manipulator limbs. Its fingerlike metal appendages curled tightly around the metal pole, anchoring him in place. Another limb uncoiled, this one equipped with a powered cutting saw. He spun it up and started slicing through the antenna mast. A stream of tiny flakes of glowing metal flew away into space.
Thirty yards away, near the bottom of the aft space station module, Nadia gripped the mast of another radio antenna. It would be faster to just tear the small dish right off the hull, she judged. She released another of the COMS’ mechanical arms and flexed its appendages—
“Hostile at three o’clock! Range close,” her computer warned abruptly.
Something crashed hard into the left flank of her robot — threatening to send her tumbling off into space. Frantically, Nadia caught at the antenna mast with a second mechanical hand. Her thrusters fired in the opposite direction, countering the impact.
Caught by surprise, she found herself staring at a monstrous figure, a ten-foot-tall humanoid machine with thin, agile arms and legs and a long torso. It was topped by an eyeless sphere bristling with antennas and other sensor arrays. A large pack equipped with maneuvering thrusters was strapped to its back. My God, she thought in alarm, the Russians had deployed one of their own KVM war robots aboard Mars One.
Quickly, Nadia lashed out at the enemy robot with a third metal limb — trying to shove it away.
Almost contemptuously, the KVM batted her riposte aside and then reached out and tore the arm off with its own mechanical hands. Trailing sparks from torn wiring, the dead limb sailed away into space.
Nadia cried out involuntarily. Through her neural link, she felt the loss of that COMS arm as a red-hot flash of pain. “Wolf Two is under attack!” she said desperately.
The Russian war machine reached out with one hand and grabbed hold of another of her limbs — securing itself to her COMS. Glittering crystals of frozen gas floated away from the KVM’s backpack thrusters as they fired again to hold it stable. The metal fingers of its other hand probed at the stump of the arm it had ripped loose, trying to find a place where it could dig in and start peeling away her robot’s protective hull.
“Hold tight!” Brad called out.
Obeying him, Nadia tightened her grip on the thin radio mast.
And then she felt another powerful impact as something slammed into the Russian war machine from below. Several mechanical limbs wrapped themselves around the KVM’s torso and legs. Another COMS had grappled with the enemy robot. Now its thrusters fired at full power, burning through all its remaining fuel to wrench the Russian machine away from her.
Nadia felt fresh agony as the arm the KVM had been using as an anchor tore loose.
Still entangled, the second COMS and the Russian robot spun off into space — moving away from Mars One at a hundred feet per second. As they rotated around each other, she could see the KVM’s hands flailing as it tried to pry itself free.
Suddenly there was a brief flash… and then the torso of the Russian war machine came apart in a cloud of frozen oxygen mixed with dark globules of blood. Splintered shards of composite armor floated away from the COMS. Locked together, the two wrecked robots fell into the endless void, shrinking rapidly until they disappeared from sight.
Inside the cockpit of her COMS, Nadia stared in horror. “No, Brad,” she said brokenly.
“I’m fine,” he reassured her quickly. “That was Cub Three and a strategically applied explosive breaching charge, not me.”
Nadia swallowed hard. She could not cry, not in zero-G. If she did, her own tears would cling to her eyes and blind her. “Thank God,” she murmured. Then she shook herself. This battle was not yet over.
Doggedly, she turned back to the small communications antenna and began prying it loose with her robot’s remaining limbs.
A couple of minutes later, Brad finished cutting away another sensor dish. He tossed it away from Mars One as though it were the world’s largest Frisbee. That was the last of them. The Russian crew inside the station no longer had any way to communicate with the world below.
He fired more thrusters and glided back around the central module until he came to a shallow bay that now lay open to space. The large, camouflaged clamshell doors that had sealed it previously were folded back against the station’s outer hull. There was a standard-sized airlock on the inner wall. This was where the KVM that almost killed Nadia must have been lurking… ready to lunge out at them from ambush, he realized.
Well, it sure was nice of the Russians to leave at least one door open for him, Brad thought coldly.
“Wolf One to Two and Three,” he said. “I am ready to enter Mars One.”
“Roger that, One,” Nadia said. Her voice echoed his own determination. “Wolf Two is prepared to breach the aft module.”
Vasey spoke up from his position at the other end of the Russian space station. “Wolf Three is ready to assault. But it looks a rather tight fit,” he said thoughtfully.
Brad nodded. Their COMS were likely to find it difficult, maybe even impossible, to maneuver inside Mars One. They hadn’t been able to get any intelligence on the station’s internal structure, but the odds were that it was broken up into separate compartments, some of which might be too small to accommodate their large, egg-shaped machines. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess we’ll see. If necessary, though, we’ll open everything up to space from the outside.”
“Mr. Martindale may not be terribly happy about that,” Vasey pointed out. “Since we’re supposed to capture Mars One intact.”
Nadia snorted. “Mr. Martindale is not here. We are.”
“A fair point,” Vasey allowed.
Brad shrugged inside his cockpit. “So we do our best not to break stuff unless we have to.”
“And the cosmonauts?” Nadia wondered.
“They get one chance to surrender,” Brad said somberly. “After that, all bets are off. Just make sure your short-range radios are set to the standard Russian frequency so you can talk to them if necessary. Is that clear?”
“As crystal,” Vasey acknowledged.
“Then let’s move.” Through his sensors, Brad looked ahead. A bright glow lit the curved horizon of the earth. Mars One was approaching the dividing line between light and shadow.