Indeed, the hour is later than he’s thought, and the situation more dire, for as the disc of the sun slips behind the Stormlands’ eyewall to the west, over the vanishing silhouettes of the Dolceti, a bird calls out from the east, from somewhere among the scraggly trees clinging to the hills there.
ThooRAT!
ThooRAT!
Should omens be believed in this place? Bruno doesn’t know, but before another minute has passed he spies a trio of tattered figures approaching him from out of those same stony hills, from the teeth of the storm itself. There’s dust and worse raining down all around them.
Bruno calls up a sensory magnifier in the clear dome of his helmet, and scans these approaching figures in every spectrum he can think of. He’s expecting Dolceti stragglers, but in fact the newcomers are Olders. Familiar ones: Sidney Lyman and his lieutenants, Brian Romset and Nick Valdi. They look exhausted, battered, barely conscious after fighting their way through the eyewall and the raging storm beyond it. But they’re moving quickly and purposefully across the sand, because…
They’re being chased by two dozen gleaming robots.
Chapter Twenty-Three
in which the old meets the new meeting the old
Bruno has faced worse odds than these, with poorer equipment to back him up, so his leap to action comes virtually without thought. He tears across the sandy plains, confident of passing Lyman and his fellows before their dainty attackers can reach them. And the look on their faces when he does pass is, he thinks, worth the thousands of years of solitude that carried him to this point. At long last he has become a sort of Buddhist, or a factory-issue mammal, fully present in the moment, able to appreciate the humor of it all and yet caring little about the outcome. He will simply do his best to smash these robots, and see what happens.
And that best is quite good indeed, for as he arrives among them they stab and hack with whirling blades that might easily have severed his head from the brickmail-reinforced neck that supports it. The blades are that sharp, yes, the blows that fast and hard. This time, the robots mean business; they’re saving nothing for the trip back home. But what Bruno lacks in speed he more than makes up for in sheer capacity; the attacks push him this way and that, but his unscathed armor scarcely sheds a molecule.
And meanwhile he’s grabbing swords, grabbing arms, firing energy beams at point-blank range. He doesn’t even bother to aim for the iron boxes on the sides of their heads; those are for merely human weapons to pierce. Bruno was never a great warrior; he merely happened to be present at a few of history’s most crucial battles. And while the abomination of blindsight training still crackles inside him, informing his actions, he is no Dolceti. Just a man, just some guy in a suit of armor. So if these robots were combat models he might have cause to worry.
But they aren’t, and he doesn’t; their impervium hulls are thin, never meant to withstand the burn of a gamma-ray laser or the punch of a hypersonic wirebomb. He’s got a blitterstaff slung across his back which he doesn’t even bother to use, because it’s cleansing to fight this one out hand-to-hand.
And the robots seem to get the message; they’ve never encountered anything like him before, either, and as five of them collapse into sparking fragments during the first few seconds of combat, the rest retreat to a safer distance, ten and twenty meters back so that Bruno must aim more carefully to hit them. And aiming carefully is not one of his better skills, and the robots are circling and regrouping with inhuman grace and fluidity, and he’s just deciding to unsling that blitterstaff after all when they suddenly leap upon him en masse.
Oh. Oh, dear.
He goes down under their weight, sprawling onto his back with a robot on each arm, a robot on each leg, two on his chest, and a dozen standing round him like the outlines of an angel. They raise their swords, preparing to peel him out of his wellstone skin no matter how long it takes.
Fortunately, there’s a response for this in the annals of the Queendom’s martial arts, with which Bruno was once, of necessity, familiar. “Discharge all!” he screams at the suit, and it responds by turning to glass underneath him and then opening up its capacitors, dumping all their stored charge. For a few nanoseconds he’s crawling with surface electrons, which quickly find their way to the ground through every object within easy arcing distance. The voltage is high, but it’s the wattage that really counts, burning paths through the robots’ own wellstone, through the very circuitry that controls them, through libraries of collective memory and programmed response. From a distance it looks like an explosion, and indeed it sends eleven robots flipping through the air, dazed and befuddled, parts of them damaged beyond repair.
And in the wake of that, Bruno shouts: “Royal override! All autronic devices, stand down and await instructions!”
The robots will not obey this command, but he knows from experience that they’ll recognize it in some way, that it will confuse them for a moment. And he takes advantage, struggling to his feet in a garment that has gone stiff and lifeless, gone black in a last-ditch attempt to drink in energy from the sky.
There are eight attackers left on their feet, staring at him with their blank metal faces, and he steps backward through a gap between them, unslinging the blitterstaff. This is a weapon that requires no finesse; it’s coded to ignore his suit, but any other wellstone it touches—for example, the impervium of a robot hull—will be subjected to an intense barrage of electrical and software and pseudochemical insults, in random patterns shifting too rapidly for the robots’ defenses.
He touches one, and it falls apart into screaming, steaming shards. Touches another, and it bursts like a chestnut in a fire. But the other six have their wits about them now, and are dancing toward him with deadly intent. There’s nothing for it but to whirl the staff around him, not with any great skill but in a simple space-filling function that leaves no room for a robot to pass. He clobbers another two before a third one manages to slip in at ground level—literally crawling on its back!—and take a firm hold on his legs. He kills that one, too, but not before he loses his balance again and tumbles over the back of another one crouching behind him.
Blast, he thinks as the ground rushes up again, these robots are cleverer than they ought to be. He shouldn’t have taken them on alone—not that he’d had much choice. Now he’s facedown in the sand, and when the first blow slices down at his neck he tries to struggle away sideways, but something is holding him. He tries to raise the blitterstaff, but something is weighing it down. He tries to fire his wrist-mounted wireguns again, but of course there’s no power. Not yet, not for another few seconds at least. The blindsight part of his mind is painfully, terrifyingly aware of that blade rushing down. And there isn’t a thing it can do.
The blow lands solidly, and Bruno’s suit is no longer absurdly durable. In fact, it’s just a fine-mesh silicon cloth, not much different from old-fashioned fiberglass. The blade doesn’t penetrate, but it does concentrate a great deal of force on a rather narrow stripe of neck. The impact is like a flash, a shock, a crashing together of cymbals. Heedless of his dignity, the King of Sol screams in rage.